The Enforcement Directorate on Tuesday arrested former National Stock Exchange chief Ravi Narain in connection with a money laundering case related to alleged illegal phone tapping of exchange employees, The Hindu reported, citing an agency official.
Narain was the managing director and chief executive officer of the exchange between April 1994 and March 2013. In April 2013, he was appointed its non-executive vice chairperson, a position he served till June 2017.
Narain was booked by the agency on money laundering charges on July 14 along with former Mumbai Police Commissioner Sanjay Pandey and Chitra Ramkrishna, another former chief of the National Stock Exchange. Pandey and Ramkrishna were arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in the same month.
The phone tapping happened when a co-location scam allegedly took place between 2010 and 2015. The scam pertains to preferential access to the National Stock Exchange trading platform that allowed certain brokers to trade before the markets opened. The first FIR in the case was filed in 2018.
The Central Bureau of Investigation lodged the FIR in the phone tapping case on July 7. The agency has alleged that Pandey had set up a company called iSec Securities that was used for electronic surveillance of the employees.
iSec Securities was one of the firms tasked to conduct security audits at the National Stock Exchange during the time the co-location scam allegedly took place. The company did not alert the stock exchange that its servers were compromised, the CBI has alleged.
Enforcement Directorate officials said that the agency found evidence of secret phone surveillance during the questioning in the case based on CBI’s July 7 FIR.
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