The CBI claimed that the email id through which the ‘mysterious Yogi’ guided former NSE MD and CEO Chitra Ramakrishna, arrested in the co-location scam, was allegedly created by her favored Group Operating Officer (GOO) Anand Subramanian, a finding which could remove the veil of the unknown ‘Yogi’.
The agency told a special CBI court, the central probe agency is also looking into the visit of Subramanian and Ramkrishna to tax haven Seychelles which was mentioned in the email exchange between Chitra Ramkrishna and the mysterious Yogi.
They said that the CBI is now focussing on whether the email id rigyajursama@outlook.com was allegedly created by Subramanian, or someone else was operating the account.
Subramanian was allegedly referred to as the ‘yogi’ in the forensic audit but the SEBI had rejected the claim in its final report. The CBI had told the special court that Subramanian was the Yogi. The agency also told that Chitra and Subramanian’s trip to Seychelles is being looked into. The agency believes that the trip was not a leisure trip and it needs a thorough investigation.
On 11th February, the SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) had charged Chitra Ramkrishna and others with alleged governance lapses in the appointment of Subramanian as the chief strategic advisor and his re-designation as group operating officer and advisor to MD. In its report, the SEBI has also mentioned an email conversation of Chitra Ramakrishna with the ‘mysterious Yogi’, suspected to be Subramanian, mentioning the Seychelles trip.
The agency is focussing on retrieving the email exchanges between Chitra Ramakrishna and rigyajursama@outlook.com, they said.
They also said, Chitra Ramkrishna, who became CEO in the year 2013, had appointed Subramanian as her advisor who was later promoted as group operating officer (GOO) at a salary of 4.21 crore INR annually.
Subramanian’s controversial appointment and subsequent elevation, besides crucial decisions, were guided by an unidentified person who Chitra claimed was a formless ‘mysterious Yogi’ dwelling in the Himalayas, a probe into her email exchanges during the SEBI-ordered audit had shown.
In her statement to SEBI, Chitra Ramakrishna had said that the unknown person having email id rigyajursama@outlook.com was a ‘Paramhansa’ or ‘Sidha-Purusha’, who didn’t have a physical body and could materialize at will. Most of these email exchanges were destroyed and the computer systems that were used to send these emails were scrapped after Ramakrishna’s exit in the year 2016, they said.
The CBI agency, which was probing the co-location scam since 2018 against a Delhi-based stockbroker and had come into action after a SEBI report showed alleged abuse of power by the then top officials of the NSE, the officials said. Chitra Ramakrishna got appointed as MD and CEO on 1st April 2013 and left the post in 2016.
The CBI has alleged that it was during this period that co-location was started by NSE. With this co-location facility, brokers could place their servers within the stock exchange premises and hence can have faster access to the markets. It is alleged that some brokers in connivance with insiders abused the algorithm and the co-location facility.
