CBI questions director of Delhi-based firm in NSE case

New Delhi  :  The CBI on Friday said that it is questioning the owner and promoter of a Delhi-based company for allegedly manipulating the National Stock Exchange (NSE) to get the first access to markets when they opened.

A Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) official said that it questioned Sanjay Gupta, promoter of the OPG Securities Pvt Ltd at its headquarters here about how he abused the server architecture of NSE in conspiracy with unknown officials of the bourse.

The CBI action comes in the wake of a case it registered on Wednesday against Gupta, his brother-in-law Aman Kakrady, Ajay Narottam Shah and some unknown officials of market regulator Sebi and the NSE.

The CBI FIR alleged that unknown officials of NSE in Mumbai had provided unfair access to Gupta's company using the co-location facility during the period 2010-2012 that enabled it to log in first to the exchange server of the Stock Exchange that helped to get the data before any other broker in the market.

The official also said that after introduction of load balancer during October 2012 while servers of all other brokers were connected to the primary servers of NSE, the owner once again allegedly managed the data centre staff of NSE to get connected to the backup servers.

"Backup servers were with zero load and therefore had provided far better and fast access to the market feed to Gupta's company in comparison to other brokers. Thus, the favour was allegedly shown by unknown officials of NSE to private company by providing market feed first in comparison to other brokers," the official said.

The CBI had carried out searches at over seven places in Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru which led to recovery of several documents.

The agency further alleged that in order to ensure the favourable report from Sebi in the enquiry carried out it against the role of his company in the misuse of TBT (tick-by-tick) architecture of NSE, influenced the unknown officials of the market regulator through bribery.

The agency also alleged that Shah, a resident of Delhi, was instrumental in exploitation of NSE TBT architecture who collected NSE trade data in year 2005-06 for carrying out research. "And with the help of these data, Shah developed an algo software named 'Chanakya' which was sold to selected brokers including said private company," the CBI said.

The CBI officials said that Gupta, along with his brother-in-law was illegally trading in Dubai, Ghana, Singapore, Hongkong and China through OPG Securities.