Mumbai/NewDelhi: Former Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey’s family firm, iSEC Services Pvt Ltd, allegedly illegally tapped phones of National Stock Exchange (NSE) employees for around eight years using devices called as “Red-Servers,” a senior Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officer said on Thursday.
According to the central agency officer, the firm committed the purportedly illegality from the basement of the NSE building in Mumbai where it was provided a small space. The officer added that the firm had installed four “Red-Servers”, one each attached to the four MTNL telephone lines serving NSE employees. Each of these devices had the capacity to tap 120 calls at a time and one such device has been seized by the CBI team during the search conducted at the firm’s office at Jogeshwari west on Friday.
The other three devices are suspected to have been be destroyed by the firm in 2019, the officer said adding that the firm used to prepare transcripts of the tapped telephonic conversations at its Jogeshwari office and supply the transcripts to then NSE bosses. CBI’s raiding team seized one such transcript from the firm’s office.
The officer said the agency has also seized 25 desktops, two laptops, mobile phones and several incriminating documents connected with the purportedly illegal phone tapping, which eventually stopped in early 2018 after NSE decided to conduct an enquiry in some other matters involving the former chief executive officer of the stock exchange, Chitra Ramkrishna.
A team of CBI officials on Friday also raided Sanjay Pandey’s residence at Patliputra building at Four Bungalow in Andheri (West). The team reached his first-floor residence around 9am and the search was going on until late evening. A resident of the building said that except for Pandey’s elderly mother, none of the Pandey family members were at home.
CBI has registered a first information report (FIR) against Pandey, Chitra Ramkrishna and Ravi Narain, also a former NSE CEO, for alleged illegal phone tapping of employees of the exchange between 2009 and 2017.
Multiple teams of the probe agency also conducted raids at 18 locations across Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Lucknow, Kota and Chandigarh, including Pandey’s residence. The case was registered on a reference from the Union ministry of home affairs, the statement said.
Ramkrishna is currently in judicial custody in the NSE co-location fraud case.
Besides the above three, the CBI has also named iSEC Services Pvt Ltd, former NSE executive vice president Ravi Varanasi and its former head (premises) Mahesh Haldipur in the case.
According to the agency, Ramkrishna, Narain, Varanasi and Haldipur had allegedly conspired and hired the services of iSEC Services Pvt Ltd to illegally intercept the phones of NSE employees.
The company was incorporated by Pandey in March 2001; his son and mother took over the company after he quit as its director in May 2006, the agency said.
The CBI also claimed the top brass of NSE had issued an agreement and work orders in favour of iSEC and illegally intercepted the phone calls of the stock market’s employees by installing machines, in contravention of provisions under Indian Telegraph Act.
“No permission for this activity was taken from the competent authority as provided under section 5 of the Indian Telegraph Act. No consent of the employees of NSE was also taken in this matter,” the agency said.
Former iSEC directors, including Santosh Pandey, Anand Narayan, Armaan Pandey, Manish Mittal, former senior information security analyst Naman Chaturvedi and Arun Kumar Singh have also been booked in the case.
Sanjay Pandey on Tuesday was interrogated by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with the NSE co-location fraud case that is also being probed by the CBI. He served as Mumbai Police commissioner for four months before he retired on June 30 this year. He also served as Maharashtra’s acting director general of police from April 2021 to March 2022.
Both the ED and CBI have been probing the NSE co-location fraud case since 2018, wherein several stock-broking companies allegedly got preferential access to the NSE’s server, when Ramkrishna was the CEO of the bourse, between 2010 and 2015.
Ramkrishna was arrested by the CBI on March 6. Former group operating officer (GOO) Anand Subramanian was also arrested in this regard on February 25.
About a dozen brokers in multiple cities are facing the CBI probe in the case, HT had reported on May 22.
The probe agencies are also investigating the purported roles of officials of NSE and market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India for allegedly giving an unfair advantage to the brokers.