SAT to hear NSE's co-location matter on Tuesday

The Securities and Appellate Tribunal (SAT) on Tuesday will hear the NSE's co-location case, wherein brokers are alleged to have received preferential access to the trading systems of the bourse.

The tribunal will hear the matters, involving the Sebi order in the NSE case, its former MD Ravi Narain and ex-CEO Chitra Ramakrishna and other executives -- Deviprasad Singh and Nagendra Kumar, as per the tribunal's cause list.

Also, the SAT will hear case involving brokers OPG Securities, GKN Securities and Way2Wealth, it added.

In September, the tribunal had asked NSE officials, including Ramakrishna, to file rejoinders within four weeks in their pleas against Sebi penalising them in the co-location case.

After an extensive probe, the Sebi in five separate orders running into 400 pages, had on April 30, last year, asked the NSE to disgorge Rs 1,000 crore, including 12 per cent interest for its alleged culpability in the case.

The order has scuttled the IPO plans of the bourse as it was banned from accessing the markets for six months or launching any new derivative products. The ban ended on October 31.

Sebi also asked Ramakrishna, Narain and two others to pay back 25 per cent of their salaries from June 2010 to March 2014. The scam came to light in 2015.

Following this, the nation's largest bourse and the people penalised for the case had challenged the order in the SAT in May 2019, seeking interim relief and full relief, saying that the Sebi orders not made a case that any trading member got any advantage because of preferential access.

The co-location case dates back to 2015, when a whistleblower wrote to Sebi alleging NSE was giving a few high-frequency traders/brokers preferential access to its servers by allowing them to place their servers in the NSE premises that benefitted both the parties at the cost of others.