Anand Subramanian, Former Operating Officer Of National Stock Exchange, Arrested By CBI

New Delhi: Former National Stock Exchange group operating officer Anand Subramanian was arrested this morning by the CBI in connection with the ongoing probe into alleged irregularities in the stock market manipulation case.

The CBI had questioned Mr Subramanian earlier this week about his role at the exchange.

He was appointed as Group Operating Officer of NSE by Chitra Ramakrishna, who is under scanner over the infamous ‘tick by tick’ market manipulation case.

In 2018, the central agency had registered the ‘tick by tick’ case against OPG Securities; its Managing Director, Sanjay Gupta; Ajay Shah, who helped develop the software; and unknown officials from the NSE and regulatory body SEBI for alleged stock market manipulation from 2010 to 2014.

The CBI is investigating the alleged unfair dissemination of information from the market exchange’s computer server to those of stock brokers. Both were set up in the same area – a scenario called co-location – offering the brokers a 10:1 (approximate) speed advantage over their competitors.

For the period of investigation (2010-2014), information was sent in a sequential manner from the stock exchange’s servers to the brokers’ through ‘tick by tick’-based system architecture.

This meant the broker who connected first to the stock exchange’s server received ‘ticks’, or the market feed, before the broker who connected later, giving him/her valuable information.

It is alleged that Sanjay Gupta had unfair access to this feed and this enabled his company, OPG Security Pvt Ltd, to access financial data a split second faster than his rivals.