The NSE imbroglio: Curiouser and curiouser.

I know I have posted about this too many times already, but could someone enlighten me as to what the brouhaha about the former NSE Chief Chitra Ramakrishna is?

She worked for a private entity and made decisions using whatever method she found to work for her. During her CEOship, NSE did extremely well, beat BSE at its own game, created great value for shareholders as well wealth for its users, and after serving for 3 years, she retired for personal reasons.

In her tenure, she created certain posts that she thought were needed to make things work in ways that she wanted them to. She recruited for these posts and paid them what she thought they deserved. All of this was well within the powers given to her by her office. She did not steal or defraud anyone. Whatever she did was done openly. The only charge could be that her method of arriving at a decision seems not to find approval from others.

What exactly is so big as to involve several government agencies, the national media, and our precious bandwidth? If it is only her method of decision-making that is being faulted, I say let those who have not sinned cast the first stone. How can you claim your method to arrive at a decision is objectively better than hers, given that the decisions were largely subjective and have had not a negative impact on what her task was as a CEO: to enhance shareholder value for the investors of NSE.

As for the co-location scam, the board has already ordered disgorgement of 25% of Chitra Ramkrishna and her predecessor, Ravi Narain’s, salaries during their tenure. Additionally, SEBI has ordered NSE to pay a hefty fine, and has debarred Chitra and Ravi from holding any posts in the domain for 5 years, which have since ended.

I really want to know what the exact charges are. Many of my friends have spoken about how she misused public funds. What public funds? NSE is a private for-profit company. If there are any public funds involved, it has to do with the co-location fraud, for which she has been fined and punished. Is this a continuation of the same matter? Or is this something else? If it is for co-location, should not other board members and the government-appointed watchdog, SEBI, and its office bearers, as well as the brokers who used this ‘facility’ and their office bearers, all be under investigation, being raided, barred from leaving the country, and being chased by journalists in the dead of the night? Why single her, Arvind, and Ravi out?

Just to repeat: I have nothing but disgust at anyone who listens to a yogi and baba, corporeal or otherwise. I would never hire a CEO who believes in such claptrap, even if the belief is personal, because there is nothing like a watertight compartment between the personal and professional when it comes to kooky beliefs. That said, I am a bit sceptical about the use of central agencies to chase down someone whose only crime, as it seems from the news, is to consult a spiritual guru about her life, both personal and professional. And while it’d be hilarious to find Anand Subramanian behind the mails, or perhaps make for an excellent potboiler of a web series if it turns out that she wrote them to herself to cover something even more sinister, it is unlikely that a charge of consulting a disembodied yogi over electronic mail can invite the ire of the central agencies to this extent. There is surely more than meets the eye. I only wonder what that is.