Phone tapping: Former Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey appears before ED again

Former Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey appeared before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in Delhi on Tuesday for questioning in a money laundering case linked to the alleged illegal phone tapping of NSE employees, officials said.

This is the second consecutive day that the retired Indian Police Service (IPS) officer is being questioned by the federal probe agency in this case.

Like Monday, the officer will continue to reply to questions on the business and operations of a firm floated by him for a security audit of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and his statement will be recorded under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, they said.

Pandey, a 1986-batch officer, retired from service on June 30. Before his four-month stint as Mumbai's commissioner of police, he served as the acting Maharashtra director general of police.

CBI had said on Monday that it questioned Pandey and another former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh in connection with the Rs 100 crore extortion allegations against former minister Anil Deshmukh.

Pandey is facing two ED and Central Bureau of Investigation FIRs -- illegal interception of phones of NSE employees by iSec Services Private Ltd, a company founded by him, and violation of Securities and Exchange Board of India guidelines in conducting NSE's system audit.

He has been questioned early this month by the ED in the alleged co-location scam at the NSE.

The CBI and ED have named Pandey, his Delhi-based company iSEC Services Pvt. Ltd, NSE's former MD and CEOs Narain and Ramkrishna, executive vice president Ravi Varanasi and head (premises) Mahesh Haldipur, among others, in their respective complaints.

The ED discovered secret phone surveillance while probing the alleged financial irregularities at the NSE, following which it reported the matter to the Ministry of Home Affairs, which in turn, asked the CBI to probe the charges, officials had said.

The CBI had alleged in its complaint that during the period 2009-17, Narain, Ramkrishna, Varanasi, and Haldipur conspired to illegally intercept the telephones of NSE employees for which they hired iSEC Services Pvt Ltd, founded by Pandey in 2001.

The former IPS officer had incorporated the company after resigning from service but his resignation was not accepted.

The company allegedly received a payment of Rs 4.45 crore for illegal tapping which was camouflaged as ''Periodic Study of Cyber Vulnerabilities'' at the NSE, the CBI alleged.

The company also provided transcripts of the taped conversations to senior management of the stock market, it had claimed.

''...top officials of NSE issued agreement and work orders in favor of the said private company and illegally intercepted the phone calls of its employees by installing machines, in contravention of provisions under Indian Telegraph Act,'' a statement from the CBI said.

Officials said the interception was stopped in 2019, months after the CBI started probing the 2018 NSE co-location scam, and the machines and other infrastructure used for interception were disposed of as e-waste by the bourse.

The alleged fraud relates to the manipulation of the stock market through electronic contrivances.

The CBI also conducted raids in the phone tapping case and claimed to have recovered original transcripts, raid server, voice samples, two laptops containing evidence related to interception, and bills generated for services rendered by iSEC, among others, from the company premises.

They had said four MTNL lines used by NSE employees having the capacity for 120 calls at a time were under the scanner.

The CBI alleged that no permission for this activity was obtained from the competent authority as provided for under Section 5 of the Indian Telegraph Act.

''No consent of the employees of NSE was also taken in this matter,'' it said.

The CBI has also listed as accused the then directors of iSEC Services Pvt Ltd Santosh Pandey, Anand Narayan, Armaan Pandey, Manish Mittal, former Senior Information Security Analyst Naman Chaturvedi and Arun Kumar Singh.

The company had conducted the safety audit around the time the co-location scam was alleged to have taken place.