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The high court here granted bail, on a surety of Rs 5 lakh, on Friday to Anjani Sinha, former chief executive of National Spot Exchange Ltd (NSEL). He has to appear every Sunday before the city police’s economic offences wing (EOW).
This came a day after his former boss, Jignesh Shah, founder of Financial Technologies India Ltd (FTIL) was remanded to police custody till the coming Thursday, in connection with the same Rs 5,600-crore NSEL scam.
Bail was also granted to Jai Bahukhandi, former assistant vice-president (AVP) of warehousing at NSEL, and Amit Mukherjee, former AVP of business development.
Sinha, Bahukhandi and Mukherjee were arrested by the EOW on October 17 last year, on charges of criminal conspiracy and fraud in the scam. The court accepted the bail plea on the reasoning that the three were served a chargesheet by the police months earlier, on January 6.
Sinha’s affidavit to the police recently became public knowledge; it implicated Shah, stating the latter was a big fan of vyaj badla and wanted to revive it via NSEL.
“Jignesh Shah was fully aware that NSEL was an unregulated market and no regulator was going to be appointed to regulate NSEL in the near future. Therefore, he wanted absolute control over this exchange in all matters,” it went.
In 2012-13, Shah reportedly wanted NSEL to be opened for newer entities and volumes were ramped up to bolster the bottom line of parent FTIL, at a time when the group’s foreign ventures were losing money. This aggression was to prove costly.
Sinha suggested Shah was planning to run NSEL in this fashion only until one of his international ventures picked up and made enough profit.
He was also confident that he would be able to bargain and get a time frame of about six months to a year to wind down NSEL contracts.
“Jignesh Shah was of the opinion that the entire matter was civil in nature and so, at the most NSEL, would declare those buyers as defaulters and recover the money from their assets. He did not expect police action of such magnitude. Otherwise, he would have revisited the decision,” went Sinha’s statement.
The only other person let out on bail among those arrested so far is Nilesh Patel, managing director of NK Proteins, the largest borrower in the NSEL scam.
