Company founded by Mumbai ex-Police Commissioner tapped NSE employee's phones: CBI

Former NSE top brass including Ravi Narain and Chitra Ramkrishna had allegedly roped in a company founded by retired Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey to snoop in on the stock market's employees by illegally intercepting their phones, the CBI has alleged in a recent FIR against them.

The CBI on Friday started a coordinated search operation in 18 cities after filing the FIR on a reference from the Union Home Ministry.

The agency has booked Pandey, his Delhi-based company, NSE officials former MD and CEOs Narain and Ramkrishna, executive vice president Ravi Varanasi and head (premises) Mahesh Haldipur among others in the FIR, officials said.

The CBI has alleged that during the period 2009-17, Narain, Ramkrishna, currently in judicial custody in the NSE co-location scam, Varanasi and Haldipur conspired to illegally intercept the telephones of NSE employees for which they hired iSEC Services Pvt Ltd, founded by Pandey in 2001.

The company received a payment of Rs 4.45 crore for the illegal tapping which was camouflaged as "Periodic Study of Cyber Vulnerabilities" at NSE, it alleged.

The company also provided transcripts of the tapped conversations to senior management of the stock market, the FIR alleged.

"...Top officials of NSE issued agreement and work orders in favour of said private company and illegally intercepted the phone calls of its employees by installing machines, in contravention of provisions under Indian Telegraph Act," a statement from the CBI said.

The agency alleged that no permission for this activity was taken from the competent authority as provided under section five of the Indian Telegraph Act.

"No consent of the employees of NSE was also taken in this matter," it said.

The agency has also listed as accused the then directors of iSEC Services Pvt Ltd Santosh Pandey, Anand Narayan, Armaan Pandey, Manish Mittal, former Senior Information Security Analyst Naman Chaturvedi and Arun Kumar Singh.

The search operation was spread across Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Lucknow, Kota, Chandigarh that started Friday morning at the premises of accused, they said.

The company had done audit around the time the co-location irregularities are alleged to have taken place.

Pandey had resigned as police officer to start iSEC Services Pvt Ltd in March 2001 but his resignation was not accepted and he returned to police service quitting as company's director in May 2006. His son and mother later took charge.

The police officer, who studied at IIT-Kanpur and Harvard University, was made Mumbai Police Commissioner during the MVA government headed by former Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray.