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Tuesday, 15 February 2022

Incredible story of how a faceless yogi ‘conned’ NSE CEO, got 9x salary, 3-day week, promotions

Shubham Batra in The Print


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New Delhi: The chief executive of a top stock exchange which handles 49 crore  transactions per day — worth a daily average turnover of Rs 64,000 crore — seeks the “guidance” of a faceless yogi to better perform her job. All over email without having ever met him.

This ‘yogi’ also gets a little-known employee of a public sector company hired as the chief strategy officer (CSO) of the stock exchange, a position that didn’t exist earlier, at an annual salary package of Rs 1.38 crore, more than nine times his previous package of Rs 15 lakh.

The ‘yogi’ gets the CEO to promote the CSO year after year to make him the group operating officer (GOO), even exempt him from the five-day work-week, allow him to come in only for three days and work the rest of the time at will.

That’s not all.

The CEO shares sensitive business information related to the stock exchange’s financial projections for five years, dividend pay-out ratio, business plans, agenda of board meeting and consultations over the ratings/performance appraisals of employees.

Eventually, a probe by the stock exchange which consulted “practitioners of human psychology” strongly suspects the CSO was himself the faceless ‘yogi’ and had created that fake identity to con the CEO and benefit from it.

It’s a shockingly bizarre ‘con job’ and even funny at one level, if it was the plot of a movie or a TV series.

Except this is no fiction, and is alleged to have happened for real at the National Stock Exchange, India’s top share exchange whose stated aim is to “catalyse India’s growth story by creating investment opportunities, enabling access and empowering our stakeholders”.

The CEO in question is Chitra Ramakrishna and the CSO she hired and then promoted is Anand Subramanian — who is also alleged to have doubled up as the ‘yogi’. Between 2013 and 2016, when Ramakrishna was NSE chief, she took business decisions on the advice of this ‘yogi’ and shared sensitive and confidential information about business matters with him.

The revelations came as part of a six-year probe that markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) undertook on complaints over misgovernance and wrongdoings at the NSE. In an order Friday, the regulator fined Ramakrishna and Subramanian Rs 3 crore and Rs 2 crore, respectively.

While SEBI maintained that allegations of Subramanian being the ‘yogi’ himself aren’t sustainable, the regulator in its order said the ex-GOO is surely an accomplice in the wrongdoings at the exchange. 

In her submissions to SEBI on whether sharing such information is against the principles of governance, Ramakrishna said: “As we know, senior leaders often seek informal counsel from coaches, mentors or other seniors in this industry which are all purely informal in nature. In a similar strain, I felt that this guidance would help me perform my role better.”


Also read: LIC IPO is a delicate business & raises troubling questions


What happened at NSE

According to the 190-page SEBI order issued Friday, NSE CEO and MD Chitra Ramakrishna hired Anand Subramanian as the bourse’s CSO in 2013 at a remuneration package of Rs 1.38 crore, over nine times his previous compensation of Rs 15 lakh at state-owned Balmer Lawrie.

The position of a CSO didn’t even exist before Subramanian’s appointment, but he didn’t have the required qualifications for such a position. 

Over a period of three years, Ramakrishna kept on promoting him, eventually making him GOO. She even exempted him from working five days a week and instead asked to come only for three days and be allowed to work the rest of the time at will.

All of these decisions were made on the instructions of a faceless ‘yogi’, who goes by the name ‘Siddha Purusha’, according to Ramakrishna’s submissions. 

She said the ‘yogi’ doesn’t possess a physical persona and can materialise at will, adding that he is a spiritual force that dwells in the Himalayas. She sent emails to an ID, rigyajursama@outlook.com, sharing sensitive and confidential information about NSE, the SEBI order showed.

While she was going about making such decisions, between 2013 and 2016, several complaints were made with SEBI to allege governance issues in the appointment of Subramanian, who was also advisor to Ramakrishna.

The SEBI then began a probe, seeking evidence and depositions from the key characters, including Ramakrishna.


Also read: 5 years, 28 banks, Rs 23,000 cr debt — how ABG Shipyard pulled off ‘India’s biggest bank fraud’


Subramanian was ‘yogi’, claims NSE

In a 2018 letter to SEBI, the NSE submitted that “its legal advisers had consulted practitioners of human psychology and according to the opinion of these practitioners, Ramakrishna has been exploited by Subramanian by creating another identity in the form of Rigyajursama to guide her to perform her duties according to his wish”.

“Ramakrishna was manipulated by the same man in the form of different identities; one as Subramanian who enjoyed her trust and other as Rigyajursama who had her devotion and dependence,” it had added.

The NSE claimed that the email ID named above, in fact, belonged to Subramanian. The claim was based on the fact that Subramanian also knew this ‘unknown person’ for 22 years. Moreover, he was party to all the email interactions between the CEO and the ‘yogi’.

The SEBI order attached several emails in its order, including one in which the ‘yogi’ instructed Ramakrishna to exempt Subramanian from five-day weeks.

Another email instructed Ramakrishna: “SOM, if I had the opportunity to be a person on Earth then Kanchan is the perfect fit. Ashirvadhams.”

Ramakrishna responded: “SIRONMANI, struggle is I have always seen THEE through G, and challenged myself to on my own realise the difference.”

‘SOM’ refers to Ramakrishna, and ‘Kanchan’ and ‘G’ to Subramanian, the regulator said in its order.

According to the order: “Ramakrishna in the emails sent to the unknown person shared information pertaining to NSE’s financial projections for five years, dividend pay-out ratio, business plans, agenda of NSE’s board meeting and consultations over the ratings/performance appraisals of NSE employees.”

Some of the other emails under investigation revealed that the unknown ‘yogi’ had been interacting with Ramakrishna regularly even on operational issues regarding senior NSE employees. 

NSE’s other troubles

This isn’t the first time that NSE has been accused of lapses in corporate governance. 

In 2017, when the exchange wanted to launch an initial public offering, allegations surfaced that its officials had provided some high-frequency traders unfair access through colocation servers, which could speed up algorithmic trading, giving unfair advantage to these traders over others.

Anand Narayan, who specialises in securities laws and works as an in-house counsel at a major private firm, told ThePrint that “SEBI’s order against NSE and its senior officials shows massive misgovernance issues in one of India’s leading stock exchanges”.

“NSE may like to challenge the order before Securities Appellate Tribunal. However, SEBI has yet again shown its firm intention to protect the interest of investors by acting against NSE,” Narayan said.

Fraud in The Indian Financial Markets


 

Monday, 14 February 2022

‘Get into bed and see what happens’ – and nine other tips to revive a tired relationship

 Nell Frizzell in The Guardian


At what point do you think a relationship becomes a long-term relationship?” I ask my boyfriend, while sitting on the toilet having a post-dinner wee. He is in front of the mirror, trimming the single thick black hair that grows out from a mole on his cheek. Our son is in the bath next to us, squirting water from one stainless steel mixing bowl into the other using a Calpol syringe.

“About here,” he says, gesturing towards the room, past my naked thighs, with a pair of nail scissors.

After nearly two years of intermittent lockdowns, working from home, reduced opportunities for travel, socialising and, in many cases, making money, and more illness, a lot of long-term relationships are looking a little tired, a little frayed. Tempers have run short; desire has faded. Especially on this most “romantic” of days, many us will be thinking that we need to address things. To freshen up. To repair. This calls for more than a box of chocolates and a bunch of flowers.

But where to start? I’ve been gleaning advice from those who have gone before me – from friends, relationship counsellors, old colleagues, writers and philosophers, even my family.

Male couple sharing a bagel with son at home.
Children will change your relationship – and not always for the better.
Photograph: 10’000 Hours/Getty Images

Lower your expectations

Your partner is not psychic: they cannot know what you think and feel and want at every turn. Nor is your partner an extension of you: they will frequently and unconsciously contradict you. So lower your expectations and try, as much as possible, to be kind. Standing at the hob, cooking yet another vat of soup (my partner and I have both decided that we need to eat fewer meals centred on butter and flour), I re-read Alain de Botton’s famous New Yorker essay Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person: “We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us – and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.” I add some salt. And a knob of butter. Well, come on…

Mind your language

My sister’s dad (who, for the genealogists in the room, is not my dad) once told me that people don’t break up over big things; they break up over how they talk to each other. Yes, in the end, your partner might sleep with someone else or steal your rent. But in most cases, the damage is done when you stop saying goodbye at the end of phone calls, stop saying thank you for dinner, stop asking the other person how their day was.

However, blaming someone else’s behaviour is unlikely to change it. “People could really do with saying what they need, not what they think the other partner should do,” says Relate counsellor Josh Smith, who has been working with couples and families for more than five years. “Also, set a time and space when you’re going to talk about things but give it a time limit. A person who is feeling anxious might want to talk about an issue, but their partner might be more inclined to avoid difficult conversations and worried it will go on for ever. So you could say: ‘Let’s talk for half an hour and then stop.’” Smith also recommends giving yourself a timeout during those exhausting, essential conversations. “When our nervous system gets very aroused, we might say things we don’t mean, or not be able to say very much at all and disconnect emotionally. Being able to take a timeout, with a planned time to return to [the discussion], will help you listen.”

Go to counselling while you still like each other

When you hear counsellors talk about their clients, says Smith, the one thing that comes up time and time again is that they wish they’d come sooner – before the fight-or-flight response got so ingrained and the conflict so advanced that partners could no longer hear each other. So, to use a rather threadbare analogy, maybe treat relationship counselling like going to the gym: something that you use regularly to keep things healthy, to nip small problems in the bud, rather than turn to when things have seriously gone to seed. It is a privilege that many people can’t afford, of course, but it might also be money well spent.

A counsellor in a book-lined room, facing a couple.
Couples’ counselling isn’t just for emergencies. Photograph: Maskot/Getty Images

Get into bed and see what happens

Sex is a pretty fundamental (and free) way to cement intimacy in a relationship. It can also act as a microcosm for the relationship: when people are feeling stressed, anxious, avoidant, low in self-esteem, bored or overlooked, it will almost inevitably lead to a drop-off in bouncing bedsprings. “For most of the couples I see, sex is an issue,” says Smith. “It’s not unusual for people in long-term relationships to have very little sex.” Well, who’d have guessed? “But that’s not a problem if it’s not a problem,” he adds. “Don’t let normative ideas about sex get in the way.”

That doesn’t mean you have to give up just yet. When I asked my family WhatsApp group how to reboot a long-term relationship, one cousin replied: “Actively listen, be nice to each other and have sex even in times you might not feel like it (and then remember how much you do actually like it).”

Flirt with other people

If you still need a little boost, remember what the psychotherapist Esther Perel says about desire in her Ted Talk, The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship: “If there is a verb, for me, that comes with love, it’s ‘to have’. And if there is a verb that comes with desire, it is ‘to want’.” The journalist Katie Antoniou puts it like this: “Go to a party and watch your partner flirt with other people and remember why you find them hot. And flirt with other people and remember people find you hot. Then go home together.”

Do at least one thing separately every day

Two women swimming in a river.
You’re still allowed to have friends. Photograph: Gary Yeowell/Getty Images

One of the great challenges in a long-term relationship is judging how much time to actually spend together. “During the pandemic, I noticed that people’s lives became a bit enmeshed,” says Smith, in possibly the greatest understatement of 2022. “Having different experiences and being able to bring those back into the relationship can be really healthy.”

As Perel points out: “We come to one person, and we are basically asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide.” We want security, companionship, perhaps children, a best friend, a trusted confidante, a red-hot lover and someone to help us fulfil our daily domestic tasks. This is, probably, an unfair expectation of any single person. Put too many eggs in the long-term partner basket and cracks are going to show, if not yolk and leaking albumen. So don’t be afraid to look outside your relationship for other connections. It is not a criticism of your romantic relationship to go on holiday, share childcare, work, go to dinner, play football and watch films with other people. And, whether it’s a hobby, a shed or a separate bed, don’t be afraid to carve out a private sphere within your relationship. My greatest – and possibly only – bit of advice about sustaining a long-term relationship is to share a bed but have two separate duvets. The Germans, as is so often the case, have the answer.

Feel the fear …

“Long-term relationships aren’t like warm baths; they’re like holding a tiger by the tail.” I’m on the phone to a friend who has been in his current relationship – I say “current” because, honestly, who am I to say? – for a mere 43 years. When it comes to relationship advice, as he admits, his understanding of dating, casual sex, breakups and asking people out is minimal. “She moved in when I was 19 and that was it, really.” But he is rather useful on the long-term front. “There are two main approaches, as I see it,” he says. “There is the passive state, which some people can find very sustaining, when it would basically be such a faff to split up that you’re staying together.” I think of my mortgage and our son and the fact that I still cannot replace my brake pads. “Or there is the active approach, where you’re always opting in. That’s what I chose.”

The reason he and his partner didn’t marry for the first 42 years of their relationship, he says, is that they always wanted to know that they were together because they were choosing to be so. “I quite liked the jeopardy,” he says. “It’s a constant dialogue between exhilaration and exhaustion. At any time, I could have walked away. We had made no promise; there was no contract. Which meant that, every day, I knew I was there because I wanted to be there.”

But what about the days when you don’t want to be there, I ask, picking a used teabag off the lid of the compost bin and putting it into the compost bin. “Well, that’s when the exhaustion comes in,” he says. “And you have to have those conversations about where you are and what you want.”

… but don’t be afraid of all change

A priest once told me that, over a lifetime, you will be married several times – and if you’re lucky, that will be to the same person. Children, work, where you live, money, health: the things that change your life will change your relationship too. So do the work to make those changes happen with, and in parallel to, your partner. Talk to each other about the ways you are developing and how you can adapt the dimensions and texture of your relationship to fit. Few of us would really want to be the person we were 10 years ago (in my case: single, recently redundant and staying in my mum’s spare room), so don’t expect your partner or your relationship to be held in aspic either.

It is also worth pointing out that the things that bring you stress outside your relationship – money worries, illness, unemployment, housing insecurity, the demands of parenting, grief and moving home – will create stress within your relationship. So check if there are things you can do to improve your own situation before blaming your partner.

Make time for quality time (even if you hate the phrase)

Happy couple on the beach.
Spend time together away from your usual domestic setup. Photograph: Oliver Rossi/Getty Images

Date nights worked for the Obamas, who once famously flew to New York, took a limo to dinner, watched a Broadway show and then flew home all in one night, during his presidency. And it was noticeable to me that the first time my partner and I spent a night away together since our son was born four years ago, we ended up not only sleeping in a bedroom covered in photographs of someone else’s whippets, but getting engaged. It doesn’t have to involve money, travel or Instagram. Time spent together away from your usual domestic coexistence – even if it’s just a swim, or a train journey, or a trip to a new launderette – can make a huge difference to how you see your partner.

Remember the little joys

Finally, having picked up my partner’s socks from the floor, made the bed, rehung the damp, onion-smelling towel he had flung in a heap over the door, and wiped the peanut butter off my forehead, I asked my old English teacher for his advice. This, after all, is the man who taught Philip Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb, with its description of the stone earl and his lady countess, who rigidly persisted, “linked, through lengths and breadths of time”. More to the point, he’s been with his partner since they met at a party aged 20, more than 40 years ago. He must, I reasoned, have some ideas about what sustains and revives a long-term relationship.

The reply comes back mere minutes later: “Amnesia, dogged optimism, a robust and shared sense of the contemptibility of public figures, alternating phases of heartfelt loyalty and shameless disloyalty with regard to friends and birth families, lonesome sheds with tools in them, compatible levels of existential angst, sunsets, recreational stimulants, utterly selfish projects, wholly unshared obsessions, a poor sense of smell, frequently sleeping in separate beds, frequently sleeping together, children, finding each other ridiculous, plant life, lakes, oceans, rock pooling, books, solvency, knowing who’s better at what, dreaming of elsewhere, avoiding all board games and exercising dictatorial authority over territories in different areas of daily mundanities.” His wife, he later tells me, probably had a better list. I would happily marry either of them.

Oh, and one final note: in all my research, nobody mentioned shutting the door when you’re on the toilet. But I’d say give it a try.

Five Pillars of Islam


 

English football: why are there so few black people in senior positions?

Simon Kuper in The FT







Possibly the only English football club run mostly by black staff is Queens Park Rangers, in the Championship, the English game’s second tier. 

QPR’s director of football, Les Ferdinand, and technical director, Chris Ramsey, have spent their entire careers in the sport watching hiring discrimination persist almost everywhere else. Teams have knelt in protest against racism, but Ferdinand says, “I didn’t want to see people taking the knee. I just wanted to see action. I’m tired of all these gestures.”  

Now a newly founded group, the Black Footballers Partnership (BFP), argues that it is time to adopt compulsory hiring quotas for minorities. Voluntary measures have not worked, says its executive director, Delroy Corinaldi. 

The BFP has commissioned a report from Stefan Szymanski (economics professor at the University of Michigan, and my co-author on the book Soccernomics) to document apparent discrimination in coaching, executive and scouting jobs. 

It is a dogma of football that these roles must be filled by ex-players — but only, it seems, by white ones. Last year 43 per cent of players in the Premier League were black, yet black people held “only 4.4 per cent of managerial positions, usually taken by former players” and 1.6 per cent of “executive, leadership and ownership positions”, writes Szymanski. 

Today 14 per cent of holders of the highest coaching badge in England, the Uefa Pro Licence, are black, but they too confront prejudice. Looking ahead, the paucity of black scouts and junior coaches is keeping the pipeline for bigger jobs overwhelmingly white. Corinaldi hopes that current black footballers will follow England’s forward Raheem Sterling in calling for more off-field representation. 

There have been 28 black managers in the English game since the Football League was founded in 1888, calculates Corinaldi. As for the Premier League, which has had 11 black managers in 30 years, he says: “Sam Allardyce [an ex-England manager] has had nearly as many roles as the whole black population.” The situation is similar in women’s football, says former England international Anita Asante. 

Ramsey, who entered coaching in the late 1980s, when he says “there were literally no black coaches”, reflects: “There’s always a dream that you’re going to make the highest level, so naively you coach believing that your talent will get you there, but very early on I realised that wasn’t going to happen.”  

Reluctant to hire 

He says discrimination in hiring is always unspoken: “People hide behind politically correct language. They will take a knee, and say, ‘I’m all for it’. You’re just never really seen as able to do the job. And then people sometimes employ people less qualified than you. Plenty of white managers have failed, and I just want to have the opportunity to be as bad as them, and to be given an opportunity again. You don’t want to have to be better just because you’re black.” 

When Ferdinand’s glittering playing career ended, he worried that studying for his coaching badges might “waste five years of my life”, given that the white men running clubs were reluctant to hire even famous black ex-players such as John Barnes and Paul Ince. In Ferdinand’s first seven years on the market, he was offered one managerial job. “People tend to employ what looks, sounds and acts like them,” he shrugs. Yet he says he isn’t angry: “Anger’s not the right word, because that’s unfortunately how they see a lot of young black men, as angry.” 

He suspects QPR hired him in part because its then co-chair, the Malaysian Tony Fernandes, is a person of colour. After the two men met and began talking, recalls Ferdinand, “he said, ‘Why are you not doing this job [management] in football?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve not been given the opportunity.’ The conversations went from there. Had he not been a person of colour, I perhaps wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to him in the way that I did.” 

Szymanski can identify only two black owners in English football, both at small clubs: Ben Robinson of Burton Albion, and Ryan Giggs, co-owner of Salford City. 

Szymanski believes discrimination persists for managerial jobs in part because football managers have little impact on team performance — much less than is commonly thought. He calculates that over 10 seasons, the average correlation between a club’s wage bill for players and its league position exceeds 90 per cent. If the quality of players determines results almost by itself, then managers are relatively insignificant, and so clubs can continue to hire the stereotype manager — a white male ex-player aged between 35 and 55 — without harming their on-field performance. 

For about 20 years, English football has launched various fruitless attempts to address discrimination. Ramsey recalls the Football Association — the national governing body — inviting black ex-players to “observe” training sessions. He marvels: “You’re talking about qualified people with full badges standing and watching people train. And most of them have been in the game longer than the people they’re watching.” 

Modest though that initiative was, Ferdinand recalls warning FA officials: “A certain amount of people at St George’s Park [the FA’s National Football Centre], when you tell them this is the initiative, their eyes will be rolling and thinking, ‘Here we go, we’re doing something for them again, we’re trying to give them another opportunity.’ What those people don’t realise is: we don’t get opportunities.”  

Rooney Rule 

After the NFL of American gridiron football introduced the Rooney Rule in 2003, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for job openings, the English ex-player Ricky Hill presented the idea to the League Managers Association. Ramsey recalls, “Everyone said, ‘God, this is brilliant’.” Yet only in the 2016/2017 season did 10 smaller English clubs even pilot the Rooney Rule. Ramsey says: “We are expected to accept as minority coaches that these things take a long time. I have seen this train move along so slowly that it’s ridiculous.” He mourns the black managerial careers lost in the wait. 

In 2019 the Rooney Rule was made mandatory in the three lower tiers of English professional football, though not in the Premier League or anywhere else in Europe. Clubs had to interview at least one black, Asian or minority ethnic (Bame) candidate (if any applied) for all first team managerial, coaching and youth development roles. Why didn’t the rule noticeably increase minority hiring? Ferdinand replies, “Because there’s nobody being held accountable to it. What is the Rooney Rule? You give someone the opportunity to come through the door and talk.” Moreover, English football’s version of the rule has a significant loophole: clubs are exempt if they interview only one candidate, typically someone found through the white old boys’ network. 

Nor has the Rooney Rule made much difference in the NFL. In 2020, 57.5 per cent of the league’s players were black, but today only two out of 32 head coaches are, while one other identifies as multiracial. This month, the former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL and three clubs, accusing them of racist and discriminatory practices. He and other black coaches report being called for sham interviews for jobs that have already been filled, as teams tick the Rooney Rule’s boxes. 

Voluntary diversity targets 

In 2020 England’s FA adopted a voluntary “Football Leadership Diversity Code”. Only about half of English professional clubs signed it. They committed to achieving percentage targets for Bame people among new hires: 15 per cent for senior leadership and team operations positions, and 25 per cent for men’s coaching — “a discrepancy in goals that itself reflects the problem”, comments Szymanski. Clubs were further allowed to water down these targets “based on local demographics”. 

The FA said: “The FA is deeply committed to ensuring the diversity of those playing and coaching within English football is truly reflective of our modern society. 

“We’re focused on increasing the number of, and ongoing support for, coaches who have been historically under-represented in the game. This includes a bursary programme for the Uefa qualifications required to coach in academy and senior professional football.” 

A report last November showed mixed results. Many clubs had missed the code’s targets, with several Premier League clubs reporting zero diversity hires. On the other hand, more than 20 per cent of new hires in men’s football were of Bame origin, which was at least well above historical hiring rates. 

Do clubs take the code seriously? Ferdinand smiles ironically: “From day one I didn’t take it seriously. Because it’s a voluntary code. What’s the repercussions if you don’t follow the voluntary code? No one will say anything, no one will do anything about it.”  

The BFP and the League Managers Association have called for the code’s targets to be made compulsory. Ferdinand cites the example of countries that set mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards of listed companies. 

Asante says it takes minorities in positions of power to understand the problems of minorities. “If you are a majority in any group, when are you ever thinking about the needs of others?” Corinaldi adds: “When you have a monoculture in any boardroom, you only know what you know, and it tends to be the same stories you heard growing up.” He predicts that once football has more black directors and senior executives, they will hire more diversely. 

The BFP’s model for English football is the National Basketball Association in the US, a 30-team league with 14 African-American head coaches. For now, that feels like a distant utopia. Ramsey warns: “If there is no revolutionary action, we’ll be having this same conversation in 10 years’ time.” And he remembers saying exactly those words 10 years ago.