The Lady And The Yogi

Who Is The Mystery Man Who Gamed The Bourses And Made The NSE Director His Willing Proxy?

- Shwweta Punj

The arrest of Chitra Ramkrishna, former MD and CEO of the National Stock Exchange (NSE), on March 6 by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the ‘Himalayan yogi’ and ‘co-location’ scams has turned the spotlight yet again on the fall from grace of the ‘queen of the bourse’. That’s how Forbes India had described Ramkrishna in 2013 when it chose her as the ‘Woman Leader of the Year’. In 2016, Business Today elevated her to its ‘hall of fame’ after listing her among the country’s most powerful women for over five years in a row. That was also the year her fall began, with the NSE board and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) finding serious governance lapses in the stock exchange she helmed, leading to her resignation in December 2016, 15 months before her tenure was to end. And this February, SEBI, in a 190-page order, claimed that an unknown “spiritual force” had been advising Ramkrishna, the first woman to head a stock exchange in India, on various aspects of the NSE’s functioning. In her response to SEBI, Ramkrishna identified the mysterious person as a “Siddha Purusha” or “yogi” dwelling mostly in the Himalayas. On March 11, the CBI told a special court that the email account through which the yogi was communicating with Ramkrishna was created by Anand Subramanian, whom she hired in 2013 as the NSE’s chief strategic officer and who was made the group operating officer (GOO) and advisor to the MD and CEO in 2015. The report of a forensics investigation conducted by Ernst & Young (EY) suggests that the yogi is Subramanian.

THE RISE & FALL...