Eight officers
Published 3 October 2026
The CBI's list of senior officers who headed the departments whose money went missing ran to eight names. For most of May, none of them was an accused.
The list
ThePrint set it out: the CBI had questioned five Haryana IAS officers, Pankaj Agarwal, Vineet Garg, Pardeep Kumar, R K Singh and Mohd Shayin, and three others, Saket Kumar, D K Behera and Mani Ram Sharma, were yet to be questioned. They had headed the departments where the money was lost. Their roles, the report said, were yet to be ascertained. That is the formal position of an agency before it has sanction to proceed against public servants.
Thursday, 14 May, and Saturday, 16 May
The CBI carried out searches on 14 May. Two days later, on Saturday, 16 May, the Haryana government gave the agency the go-ahead to probe the role of five IAS officers: Vineet Garg, Pankaj Agarwal, Mohd Shayin, Pradeep Kumar and R K Singh. The permission is under Section 17A of the Prevention of Corruption Act, which requires prior approval before an inquiry into a public servant's official decisions. It is the step the state had declined in the earlier cases mentioned in chapter 17.
Thursday, 21 May: the first chargesheet
Five days later the CBI filed its first chargesheet. It named 15 accused, including six bankers per The Tribune, and described misappropriation of about Rs 504 crore from the accounts of Haryana departments. No IAS officer was among them. The agency's statement said investigation into further aspects, including the role of public servants, continued. A chargesheet is the state's allegation, and every person named in it is presumed innocent until a court says otherwise.
The CBI's account of the mechanism was specific. It said the accused bank officials and private persons conspired to divert government funds into accounts of shell entities, and the Indian Express listed the beneficiary firms and the bankers charged. The two documents together read like a ledger rather than a story, which is the point of a chargesheet.
The bank's own dismissals
While the agencies built their cases, the bank was removing staff. Reports in April and May said it had dismissed employees including Naresh Kumar on 23 or 24 April and others by early May. Among the allegations reported against them were that Amit Dewan had taken Rs 50 lakh and that Randhir Singh had received Goa trips. These are allegations drawn from the agencies' papers, and the sources reviewed for this file do not carry the individuals' responses.
A death
One more fact belongs in the record, stated plainly and without inference. Press reports said that Balwant Singh, a senior accounts officer at HPGCL, whose number was linked to one of the accounts, died by suicide, and that before his death he made allegations against a co-accused. A separate report said an accounts officer who had received a CBI notice died after a fall at the Haryana Civil Secretariat. This file reports those facts as they were reported, draws no inference from them, and notes that the sources reviewed do not carry a finding on either. If you or someone you know is struggling, please speak to someone you trust or a helpline.
By the end of May, the picture was this: bank staff and private parties charged, IAS officers under sanctioned inquiry, and two of them already suspended. June would change that.
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