Diwali in Sector 7
Published 3 October 2026
A chargesheet is not a verdict, and a chargesheet about bribery is a document whose most colourful details come from witnesses who have an interest in being believed. With that said, the CBI's third chargesheet, filed on 2 September, contains a set of allegations about gifts to senior IAS officers that The Indian Express reported in detail on 30 September. They are set out here as the agency's case, with the officers' non-response noted.
Two coins, 16 October
The CBI has charged IAS officer Vineet Garg with allegedly accepting illegal gratification in the form of two 50-gram gold coins delivered to his residence through a man at the behest of Ribhav Rishi. According to the chargesheet, a carrier named Amritpal told the CBI that about four or five days before Diwali in 2025, Rishi directed him to collect two coins from Sawan Jewellers in Sector 35 and deliver them to a government bungalow in Sector 7A, Chandigarh. Amritpal said he reached about 7 to 7:30 pm and called Rishi, who told him to come inside. Two or three police control room vehicles were allegedly parked nearby, with a guard at the gate.
As Rishi allegedly checked the contents of the packet, a thin person matching Garg's description walked out into the garden area, the chargesheet says, and Rishi handed the contents to Garg. A technical analysis of call detail records of Amritpal, Rishi, Garg and another accused around 7 pm on 16 October 2025, the CBI said, corroborated their presence and movements. The date is a Thursday. Garg did not respond to text messages or phone calls seeking comment, according to the newspaper.
Hotel bills
For Mohammed Shayin, then managing director of HPGCL, the CBI alleges that he obtained undue advantage from Rishi while a public servant. The evidence cited is a set of bills. One, dated 3 November 2025, from a restaurant inside a Chandigarh hotel, records the guest name as Shayin and a total of Rs 35,629 paid in cash; the CBI claims the people accompanying him were seated outdoors and that Rishi made the payment. A party at a second restaurant on 10 January 2025, for Shayin and his wife, cost Rs 58,399, a food bill of Rs 35,444 and a liquor bill of Rs 22,955, paid in cash. The hotel's assistant food and beverages manager told the CBI that after the party Shayin was told "everything was taken care of by Mr Ribhav Rishi". A third bill, dated 8 May 2025, for Rs 73,073 was paid in cash at first; the CBI says the matching cash reached the hotel from Rishi seven or eight days later.
The amounts are small beside the sums in the rest of the file. That is what makes them useful to a prosecutor: small gifts to named people on named dates are easy to document and hard to explain as anything other than gifts. They are also, in a legal sense, the easy part. The harder charge is the link between a gift and a decision, and the chargesheet's job is to supply it. Shayin, like Garg, did not respond to the newspaper's calls and messages.
Parties for a principal secretary
The chargesheet's third allegation concerns Pankaj Agarwal, a 2000-batch IAS officer who was principal secretary of the School Education and Agriculture departments. The Indian Express's piece describes allegations of lavish parties organised for him, including performances at which cash was allegedly showered on dancers. The same chargesheet, per the New Indian Express, ties him to two accounts: those of the Haryana School Shiksha Pariyojana Parishad and the Haryana State Agricultural Marketing Board, both opened during his tenure, in violation of the Finance Department guidelines. The CBI says it recorded a net loss of Rs 60.54 crore from those fraudulent transactions. The agency arrested Agarwal in June. The CBI separately told a court that Rishi, in the bail hearing, funded parties with dancers and escorts, luxury hotel stays and leisure and foreign trips; it cited a Goa trip for a co-accused at Rs 2.52 lakh and an international trip, including a stay at Dubai's Burj Al Arab, at Rs 7.16 lakh.
What these allegations are and are not
They are the prosecution's account of gifts from a man the agency calls the principal architect of the fraud to officials whose departments' money was in his branch. They are not proof that any gift caused any decision. The officers named have not, in the reports reviewed, responded in detail. Hindustan Times reported that the trial court cannot take cognisance of the chargesheet until the state and the Union personnel ministry grant sanction for prosecution, a point a later chapter returns to.
Two themes recur in the CBI's account. The gifts are small and personal. The gifted people are the ones who had signatures or influence over where the departments' money went. Reading the chargesheet, the shape of the alleged transaction is not a bribe in a briefcase. It is a long habit of being taken care of.
The coins were delivered in the second half of October 2025. By January, the accounts would start producing paperwork that did not match.
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