It may be surprising for those who do not have personal experiences of how people vested with powers arrogate it to themselves and indulge in favourtism and nepotism with impunity as a culture of sycophancy and fear prevails in offices giving unfettered opportunities to the bosses to run the show as per their whims and fancies.
New Delhi: The sensational last month’s National Stock Exchange (NSE) expose is not a case which would surprise anyone. It is also not surprising that the then managing director and chief executive officer of this reputed stock exchange, Chitra Ramkrishnan, went on with her shenanigans unquestioned by anyone on the SEBI board.
She brought in Subramanian Anand, a former middle-level employee of Balmer and Lawrie with zero exposure to capital markets, as the chief strategic advisor and later designated him as chief operating officer and advisor to herself on an annual salary of Rs 5 crore against his last drawn salary of Rs 15 lakh in his previous company.
Ramkrishna was totally dependent on Subramanian Anand and did not do anything without his consultation.
It may be surprising for those who do not have personal experiences of how people vested with powers arrogate it to themselves and indulge in favourtism and nepotism with impunity as a culture of sycophancy and fear prevails in offices giving unfettered opportunities to the bosses to run the show as per their whims and fancies.
Anand Subramanian used to visit Chennai over every weekend on the pretext that he was based out of Chennai, so, had to travel to Mumbai for work but the document showed that he was in fact based in Mumbai itself.
Arbitrary and disproportionate increases of salary and allowances were given to Anand.
He was brought in at a consolidated salary of Rs 1.68 crore per annum in 2013-14. It was raised to Rs 2.01 crore and then to Rs 2.32 crore in 2014-15; to Rs 3.3 crore and Rs 3.67 crore in 2015-16 and finally to Rs 4.21 crore in 2016-17.
The NSE board delegated substantial power of management to Subramanian Anand equal to Ramkrishna but neither the managing director nor vice-chairman in non-executive category Ravi Narain or president and company secretary J Ravichandran, who were present in SEBI’s board meeting, raised any objection to this illegality of delegation of powers to a person who was merely a consultant.
Ramkrishna also shared certain internal confidential information of the NSE with an unknown person by addressing her correspondence to an email id rigyajursama@outlook.com (referred as ‘unknown person’/rigyajursama@outlook.com).
The unknown person was none other than Subramanian Anand. It was found by audit company Ernst & Young in its forensic audit of the emails exchanged between the unknown person and Ms. Subramanian and the NSE, that comissioned the audit, concurred with it.
The NSE and it’s board were aware of the irregularities on the part of Ramkrishna in the appointment of Subramanian but it ignored it.
To top it all, NSE allowed Ramkrishna to resign and go scot free despite having knowledge that she had committed illegalities in the appointment of Subramanian Anand and shared confidential information with Anand.
Ramkrishna had joined the SEB at an annual remuneration of more Rs 6.59 crore and it reached above Rs 10.50 crore when she resigned.
Nirnimesh Kumar is a retired journalist. He worked in The Hindu for 25 years where he covered the legal beat. But his interest is prolific, including politics and history. He is a post graduate in history from Delhi University.