An interesting India connection with Penson, the clearing house and broker-dealer alleged by Matt Taibbi to have trading software that lets facilitates naked short selling (note: this is from October 2007):

“ICICIdirect.com, the online broking arm of ICICI Securities, today launched its overseas trading service that will allow its resident Indian customers to buy and sell equities across 13 US stock exchanges, including NYSE and Nasdaq.

ICICIdirect.com has tied up with Penson Financial Services, the fourth largest clearing and broker-dealer company in the US, as its overseas trading partner. Penson Financial Services handles about 10,00,000 settlements everyday and has over $6.8 billion in assets, including customer assets.”