In a recent statement, renowned businessman Jignesh Shah, while calling co-location a 'super white-collar crime', said that the government needs to probe the role of former finance minister P Chidambaram and others during the previous UPA regime in allowing a top stock exchange to offer this facility to select brokers. He also said that co-location can generate billions of dollars of illegal gains in a fraction of a second. A co-location, commonly known as colo is a data-centre facility in which a business can rent space for servers and other computer hardware for its capital expenditures associated with building and/or maintaining and updating a large computing facility. 

Shah blames former FM

Shah, who was known as 'India's Exchange Man', made this statement on the basis of the blame that he has put on former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram for all the troubles that his business empires have had to suffer. He has been famous for launching 14 exchanges across six continents including the top commodity bourse Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX). All of this was, however, before he had to exit all those businesses in the aftermath of the Rs 5,600-crore payment default at his erstwhile FT Group's agriculture spot exchange The National Spot Exchange Limited (NSEL).

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He blamed ‘illegal’ roadblocks in the financial sector for the slowdown of the economy and said that India could have become the 'price-setter' for the world financial market if these roadblocks had not been created for him.

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He said that it was a big loss of opportunity for his businesses as they were on top in all the exchanges that they had set up. He also said that they were going to replicate the same success with the stock exchange that they were starting. But, he believes that in the process India also lost the opportunity to become the world's top financial marketplace as the same momentum cannot be resumed now and the exchange space has already gone back to the level where it was many years ago.

Attacking P. Chidambaram, Shah said that he was targeted by the former Finance Minister to protect the interest of his 'pet exchange' as their dominance was threatened by MCX-SX, which had gotten the licence to run a full-fledged stock exchange and was in process to launch operations before the NSEL crisis broke out.

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NSE has refuted allegations

The National Stock Exchange (NSE) officials, however, have denied any role in the NSEL case and have also rejected allegations of its co-location facility favouring selected few. Meanwhile, Chidambaram remains to be Judicial Custody in connection with the INX Media case.

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