The Market Mafia : Chronicle of India’s High-Tech Stock Market Scandal & The Cabal That Went Scot-Free.

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.