The chairman of bourse operator Financial Technologies (India) Ltd, Jignesh Shah, was arrested on Wednesday by the Mumbai Police for his alleged involvement in the Rs. 5,600-crore National Spot Exchange Limited (NSEL) scam.
Shah has been under police investigation after National Spot Exchange Ltd, a commodities exchange owned by Financial Tech, abruptly suspended trade in most of its commodities contracts last year.
Shah came under scanner last year, when his group company NSEL faced a payment crisis and nearly 18,000 investors allegedly lost millions in late July.
Shah had been the chairman and managing director of Financial Technologies since January 2001 and now serves as group chief executive.
With Shah’s arrest, the total number of arrests in the scam has gone up to seven.
Since the NSEL crisis came to fore, the FTIL group, Shah and his close aide Joseph Massey came under increased regulatory scrutiny and was ordered by both the Sebi and FMC as not fit and proper to run any exchanges in the country.
Besides being the founder chairman and group chief executive of Financial Technologies Group, Shah is also the founder of MCX, the world’s eighth largest commodity futures exchange, in over 12 years.
Shah is a first-generation entrepreneur and the founder/promoter of the FTIL Group, founded in 1999.
He was actively involved with the automation of the trading systems at Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and was also responsible for designing and implementing various modules of the back-office systems of BSE, particularly for market operations and surveillance.
