Mumbai/ Chennai: The faceless Himalayan yogi who steered the life of the former NSE CEO, Chitra Ramakrishna, according to reports, is the group operating officer she appointed, Anand Subramanian, himself. The yogi and Subramanian were the same person whom Ramkrishna consulted, using a private email service. The IT officials have unearthed emails in which the Yogi had asked Chitra to travel to Seychelles together.
The Income Tax Department on Thursday raided the premises of former NSE MD and CEO Chitra Ramkrishna and group operating officer, Anand Subramanian, in Mumbai and Chennai as part of a tax evasion investigation against them.
The searches were aimed at checking and gathering evidence against the two facing charges of financial irregularities and tax evasion after it was suspected that illegal financial gains could have been made by them by sharing confidential data of the exchange with possible third parties, they said.
The premises of Ramkrishna and Subramanian were raided by officials of the Mumbai investigation wing of the Income Tax department early morning.
Chitra Ramkrishna, once known as “queen of the bourses” is the former chief executive officer of the National Stock Exchange, a Mumbai-based bourse that manages stocks and derivatives.
Ramakrishna was the second-highest paid executive in the financial services industry in FY16 before she quit.
A certified chartered accountant, Ramakrishna was appointed joint managing director of NSE in 2009 and promoted to CEO in 2013. Her salary that year was second only to Aditya Puri’s, then managing director of HDFC Bank, who took home Rs 9.7 crore, and almost three times that of BSE CEO Ashishkumar Chauhan, who earned Rs 3.3 crore.
But in 2015, things took a turn for the worse for Ramakrishna, after a Singapore-based whistle-blower alleged that a Delhi-based member on the NSE was able to access privileged price information by linking to servers and getting access to the least crowded servers.
This later came to be known as the co-location scam where select traders were allegedly given preferential access to data and trading systems through the co-location facility at the exchange. Ramakrishna resigned from NSE in December 2016 due to personal reasons.
Ramkrishna hit the headlines after a recent Sebi order said she was steered by a yogi, dwelling in the Himalayan ranges, in the appointment of Anand Subramanian as the exchange’s group operating officer and advisor to the managing director (MD).
According to SEBI, Ramkrishna shared certain internal confidential information, including financial and business plans of NSE, dividend scenario and financial results, with the yogi and even consulted him over the performance appraisals of the exchange’s employees.
The regulator noted in its order that she refused to reveal the identity of the unknown person and sought to claim that the unknown person is a spiritual force.
According to reports, the yogi and Subramanian were the same person whom Ramkrishna consulted, using a private email service.
According to reports from ET, NSE consulted experts in human psychology who believed that Subramanian created another identity (Rigyajursama) to make her perform her duties as per his whims.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India charged Ramkrishna and others for 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.
SEBI levied a fine of Rs 3 crore on Ramkrishna, Rs 2 crore each on the National Stock Exchange (NSE), Subramanian, former NSE MD and CEO Ravi Narain, and Rs 6 lakh on V R Narasimhan, who was the chief regulatory officer and compliance officer.
SEBI also directed NSE to forfeit the excess leave encashment of Rs 1.54 crore and the deferred bonus of Rs 2.83 crore, of Ramkrishna. In addition, SEBI barred NSE from launching any new product for six months.
There is little or no information about Anand (Subbu) on Linkedin or the numerous websites that track corporate profiles. Internal guidelines of large international companies such as Paypal say that it is highly suspicious if someone’s footprint has been completely wiped out from the net. Subramanian, who had no digital footprint, went on to become the group operating officer in a very large, highly technology-intensive and sensitive organisation like the NSE, which is a first-line regulator.
Chitra Ramkrishna resigned from NSE on 2 December 2016. However, SEBI raised serious questions on how the NSE board allowed her to exit from the Exchange, despite the misconduct in appointing and sharing confidential information with an unknown person. “SEBI examination found that in spite of having knowledge of such grave irregularities and misconduct on the part of Chitra Ramkrishna on the appointment of Anand Subramanian in the NRC and NSE board meeting held on 21 October 2016 and knowledge of exchange of confidential information by Chitra Ramkrishna with an unknown person in the NSE Board meeting held on 29 November 2016, NSE and its NRC and board members, in the board meeting held on 2 December 2016, allowed Chitra Ramkrishna to exit through resignation despite having committed such bizarre misconduct as reflected from her email correspondence with a fictitious email address apparently belonging to Anand Subramanian without taking any action in this regard,” the order says.
The SEBI order tabulates and documents the extraordinary rise of Anand Subramanian, with the connivance of the NSE board, without declaring him a key management person (KMP) even while he was appointed on the boards of NSE’s subsidiary companies and almost every decision of the Exchange, since his appointment as a consultant, was routed through him. He also availed of perks that were not given to any other consultant; he travelled first class around the world, often accompanying Ms Ramakrishna and was allowed to spend two to three days a week in Chennai, where his wife was also employed by the Exchange.
Anand Subramanian was asked to resign in October 2016 and the drama of his removal has been documented by Moneylife editors Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu in their book Absolute Power: Inside Story of the National Stock Exchange’s Amazing Success, Leading to Hubris, Regulatory Capture and Algo Scam, released in June 2021.