ANAND SUBRAMANIAN Vs. CENTRAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The present bail application is filed under Sec. 439 and 167(2) of the Code Of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (hereinafter referred to as "the Code") for grant of regular bail in FIR bearing no RC/AC1/2018/A0011 dtd. 28/5/2018 registered at PS CBI/AC-I for offences punishable under Sec. 120B/204 IPC and Sec. 7/12/13(2) read with 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act,1988 (hereinafter referred to as 'PC Act') and sec. 66 of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The petitioner prayed as under:

(2.) The facts as alleged in FIR are that Sanjay Gupta who was owner and promoter of M/s OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. during 2010 to 2014 abused the server architecture of National Stock Exchange (hereinafter referred to as "NSE") in criminal conspiracy with unknown officials of NSE. Sanjay Gupta with the help of his brother in law namely Aman Kokrady and other unknown persons in furtherance of the criminal conspiracy managed data centre staff of NSE who passed the information regarding switching on time of NSE exchange servers. OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. by unknown officials of NSE was given access to technologically latest and least crowded servers at that particular period which helped OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. to be mostly to login firstly on the Exchange Server of the NSE and this particular setup of server gives a 10:1 (Approx.) speed advantage in comparison to other brokers. The information was disseminated till 2014 by exchange server to the brokers attached with co-location facility through 'tick by tick' (TBT) based system architecture. The architecture data was disseminated in a sequential manner whereby the stock broker who connected first to the server of Stock Exchange received ticks i.e. market feed before the stock broker who connected later. Sanjay Gupta had enjoyed unfair access to co-location facility of NSE between 2010 to 2014 that enabled OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. to login first to the secondary server and to get the data before everyone else which allowed a split second faster access to the data feed of NSE. A split-second faster access is considered to result in huge gains for any stock trader.

(3.) It was revealed during investigation that the Chitra Ramakrishna (hereinafter referred to as "co-accused") worked as Joint MD, NSE from 2009 till 31/3/2013 and exercised the powers of MD. She was appointed as MD and CEO of NSE on 1/4/2013. The co-location was conceptualized and implemented during her tenure as Joint MD and was responsible for day to day operations of the exchange during the relevant period. Muralidharan Natarajan, CTO of NSETECH (a subsidiary of NSE) was responsible for placing co-location architecture at NSE and was reporting to co-accused. It was also revealed that during the period 2010-15 when the co-accused was managing the affairs of NSE, OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. had connected to the secondary POP server on 670 trading days in the Futures and Options segment. The investigation regarding allegations of preferential access granted to certain brokers by officials of NSE and undue gains made out of it during the tenure of co-accused and the petitioner/Anand Subramanian (hereinafter referred to as "the petitioner/accused) is underway.