"It was a wonderful experience interacting with you and appreciate the way you have planned and executed the whole publication process within the agreed timelines.”
Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh Pal
In 2008, the then SEBI Chairman C B Bhave’s detachment from his Dharma as ‘the market watchdog’ opened the door for data theft at the National Stock Exchange (NSE), India’s largest asset pool. It also led to the installation of defective Co-location (COLO) trading infrastructure at NSE, by an unofficial decree, which gave a select few brokers preferential access to equity derivatives. Fast-moving trading bots, deep-rooted nexus between enterprising PhD scholars Ajay Shah and Susan Thomas, economists, top dollar earning executives, politicians, bureaucrats and salivating brokers were at play.
In 2015, SEBI was woken up by a whistleblower, who described the contours of a front-running market operation perpetrated for over five years involving the use of COLO and High-Frequency Trading. Surprisingly, SEBI never scrutinized NSE’s COLO grid – an omission of duty – before the whistleblower highlighted the skulduggery.
Harshad Mehta and Ketan Parekh are considered the ‘formidable villains’ for exploiting the systemic loopholes to manipulate share prices. Once the Demigods of Dalal Street, the rogue stock traders attracted such severe crack-down from government investigative agencies that could shock even the most hardened criminals. But a scandal of much larger magnitude involving data theft at NSE and the Multi Commodity Exchange, that Mehta and Parekh could ever rev-up, has largely remained a mystery.
The author’s path-breaking investigative journalism fleshes out the meticulous planning and organization behind the COLO scam, the dark drama involving SEBI probe and its loosely-knit final verdict.
Palak Shah
Palak Shah has been a journalist in Mumbai for nearly 15-years. He has worked for most premier pink papers including The Economic Times, Business Standard and The Financial Express. Currently, he works with The Hindu Business Line. He was drawn to crime reporting at the age of 19 but a few years in the field told him that the fabric of crime had changed and the organised gangs, as Mumbai had witnessed during the eighties, no longer existed. It was business and markets that dominated the scenario. His passion to unravel the intricacies of the ‘white money’ economy led Palak to the world of finance and regulations.
