Phone-tapping at NSE: Mumbai ex-top cop's firm saw biz dip in recent years

The firm associated with former Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey has seen a declining revenue since it was said to be engaged in illegal phone-tapping.

The highest revenue iSec Services recorded over the last decade was Rs 4.6 crore in 2012-13. The 2020-21 revenue of Rs 1.6 crore was a 66 per cent drop from then; the firm’s profit was Rs 64 lakh. This is 53 per cent lower than the Rs 1.35-crore profit in 2011-12, the highest over the last 10 years.

The data has been compiled by the company’s financials. Numbers over the last 10 years were included in the analysis. The company recorded a total revenue of Rs 27.4 crore between 2011-12 and 2020-21. The profit it earned was Rs 7.1 crore (see chart 1).

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) are probing it over its connection with the work it did for the National Stock Exchange. The name’s firm came up during an investigation of the NSE co-location scandal, which involved preferential access to certain brokerages to the exchange servers. Government agencies are investigating the exchange over the practice, which allowed some to profit from trades executed on the stock exchange ahead of others. 

iSec Services was incorporated in 2001. The directors, according to the latest available documents, include Anand Narayan and Santosh Pandey. Past directors include Armaan Pandey and Manish Mittal. Manish Mittal was a director between March 20, 2013 and October 1, 2013. Armaan Pandey was a director between February 21, 2012 and September 2, 2017.

An order in March 2017 confirmed that it had moved its office from Delhi to Maharashtra. The current address is in Jogeshwari Mumbai. Details on the website speak of a continued presence in Delhi, besides Pune and Kolkata.

The company’s website says it provides multiple services. This includes background checks of employees, a verification product to ensure the information they provide is authentic as well as penetration testing. Penetration testing checks for system vulnerabilities that would be visible to an insider. It essentially tests for the ability to penetrate internal systems by a regular employee who has been terminated or removed.

“Penetration team will connect to the client’s internal network and attempt to compromise the servers, workstations and other devices… Using compromised accounts or through a normal account provided by the client, we will attempt to gain administrative/root access to servers, network equipment and other machines in the network,” it said.

iSec would conduct this over two to three weeks, according to information on its website. It also said it worked to detect and prevent theft of information with clients in India and abroad.

The National Stock Exchange’s top brass, who are under investigation for their role in the co-location scandal, are said to have used iSec for tapping employee phones, according to an earlier Business Standard report. The company allegedly made Rs 4.45 crore from these activities.

The phone tapping is said to have been illegal, and took place between 2009 and 2017. Chitra Ramkrishna and Ravi Narain stepped down from their NSE roles in 2016 and 2017, respectively. Pandey retired as Mumbai police commissioner on June 30, 2022.