JUDGMENT :

Sudhir Kumar Jain, J.

1. The present bail application is filed under sections 439 and 167(2) of the Code Of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (hereinafter referred to as "the Code") for grant of regular bail in FIR bearing no RC/AC1/2018/A0011 dated 28.05.2018 registered at PS CBI/AC-I for offences punishable under sections 120B/204 IPC and sections 7/12/13(2) read with 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 (hereinafter referred to as 'PC Act') and section 66 of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The petitioner prayed as under:

A. Release the Accused/Applicant Anand Subramanian on bail in relation to the captioned case titled "CBI v. Chitra Ramakrishnan & Ors.." arising out of the First Information Report dated 28.05.2018 bearing no. RC AC1 2018 A0011, subject to such conditions or directions, as deemed fit by this Hon'ble Court; and

B. Pass any such other order(s) as it may deem fit and proper in the interest of justice.

2. The facts as alleged in FIR are that Sanjay Gupta who was owner and promoter of M/s. OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. during 2010 to 2014 abused the server architecture of National Stock Exchange (hereinafter referred to as "NSE") in criminal conspiracy with unknown officials of NSE. Sanjay Gupta with the help of his brother in law namely Aman Kokrady and other unknown persons in furtherance of the criminal conspiracy managed data centre staff of NSE who passed the information regarding switching on time of NSE exchange servers. OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. by unknown officials of NSE was given access to technologically latest and least crowded servers at that particular period which helped OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. to be mostly to login firstly on the Exchange Server of the NSE and this particular setup of server gives a 10:1 (Approx.) speed advantage in comparison to other brokers. The information was disseminated till 2014 by exchange server to the brokers attached with co-location facility through 'tick by tick' (TBT) based system architecture. The architecture data was disseminated in a sequential manner whereby the stock broker who connected first to the server of Stock Exchange received ticks i.e. market feed before the stock broker who connected later. Sanjay Gupta had enjoyed unfair access to co-location facility of NSE between 2010 to 2014 that enabled OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. to login first to the secondary server and to get the data before everyone else which allowed a split second faster access to the data feed of NSE. A split-second faster access is considered to result in huge gains for any stock trader.

2.1. NSE did not have the system of starting TBT servers (tick by tick server) at a fixed time every day. Sanjay Gupta with the help of and from unknown persons managed the data centers staff of NSE who passed the information regarding switching on time of NSE exchange servers. NSE improved the system of imbalance load factor among different TBT co-location server during October 2012 and introduced load balancer among the various TBT co-location servers. Load balancer ensured that the load is evenly distributed among the TBT servers. There were back up servers were also available in NSE for providing connection to the servers of the brokers only in case if primary servers had some technical glitch or failure. The servers of all other brokers were connected to the primary servers of NSE but Sanjay Gupta once again dishonestly and fraudulently managed the data centre staff of NSE who started to let OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. connected to the backup servers which were with zero load and therefore had provided far better and fast access to the market feed to the OPG Security Pvt. Ltd. in comparison to other brokers. This had resulted in wrongful gain to OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. and wrongful loss to other brokers/investors.

2.2. SEBI on receiving the complaints of exploitation of TBT architecture by OPG Securities Pvt. Ltd. conducted enquiry. According to Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) Report, O