Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said the Centre is looking into the corrective steps taken by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) in response to the irregularities at the National Stock Exchange (NSE) that led to the exit of Chitra Ramkrishna as the managing director and CEO in December 2016.

The past developments at the bourse were an instance of opaque and discretion-based decision making beyond the realm of law and governance, she said. Sitharaman made these comments in an interview to The Economic Times.

The Centre has no intentions to weaken any institution, she said, but the question remains if the market regulator with its current powers handled the incident adequately and properly.

There is a general perception that Sebi did not handle the issue properly, she added.

Stand reversal

At a press conference here on Tuesday, the finance minister declined to make any fresh comments. Replying to a question on whether the action taken by Sebi was adequate, Sitharaman said she cannot comment at this stage on whether the regulator took adequate correctional step to penalise the offenders.

“I have no comment to make on whether adequate correctional steps were taken in the sense of penalising of those who were responsible for it. I have no view this way or that way, till I get into the bottom of this issue,’’ she added.

Her comments comes just days after the CBI questioned Ramkrishna in relation to the co-location case where certain brokers received preferential access to the NSE’s servers. It came to light after an anonymous whistleblower wrote letters to Sebi and the finance ministry. In 2019, Sebi directed NSE to pay Rs 625 crore for the misuse of the co-location facility.

A recent Sebi order revealed that Ramkrishna was guided by a mysterious “Himalayan Yogi” in taking key business decisions and that she had also shared certain confidential internal information on the NSE.