Four firms and no offices
Published 3 October 2026
If you want to understand where the money is alleged to have gone, start with the registered offices. Several of the firms at the centre of this case, according to the people named as their owners, did not have any.
Capco Fintech Services
The largest recipient in the ED's account is Capco Fintech Services. The agency told the Panchkula court that Rishi created it in the name of dummy partners, his personal assistant Bhupinder Singh and the driver's wife Sapna. The registered mobile numbers on the firm's accounts at IDFC Bank and Yes Bank, the ED said, belonged to Rishi himself, which established, in its view, that he was operating and controlling the firm. Capco, per the ED, had no office, either at its registered address or anywhere else. It allegedly received Rs 471.69 crore directly from government departments' accounts and from two Panchkula schools, DC Model Senior Secondary School and DC Montessori School.
The majority of the funds in Capco, the ED said, went on to jewellers: Sawan Jewellers, Malik Jewellers, KLG Jewellers and others. We come to those in a later chapter. For now, note the shape: a firm with two signatories who, by their own accounts, signed whatever they were asked to sign.
RS Traders and SRR Planning Gurus
The second entity, RS Traders, allegedly received Rs 43.80 crore: Rs 23.07 crore from the Haryana School Shiksha Pariyojana Parishad, Rs 16.23 crore from Chandigarh Smart City Limited and Rs 4.5 crore from CREST. The third, SRR Planning Gurus, was incorporated in July 2024, the ED said, with Rishi's mother Kamlesh Rishi and a chartered accountant, Ankur Sharma, as directors. It allegedly received Rs 55.33 crore. Unlike Capco, SRR had an office, in Industrial Area, Phase 2, Chandigarh. The ED says it was used to bring cash after collection and then to distribute it to individuals across Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula on Rishi's direction. Ankur Sharma's wife told the ED that Rishi controlled the transactions of SRR through her husband.
In total, the ED told the court Rishi had siphoned off Rs 570.82 crore through three firms: Capco, RS Traders and SRR, with the driver as proprietor of one, the driver's wife and the PA as partners in another, and his mother and the CA as directors in the third. The agency also said Rishi and his wife, Divya Arora, allegedly received Rs 34.22 crore from various shell entities. The CBI's later bail opposition put a different, narrower figure on his personal receipts: Rs 4.40 crore and Rs 1.50 crore from two shell entities transferred to his personal accounts, and Rs 18.32 crore to his wife. The two figures describe different sets of transactions, drawn by two agencies at different dates. This file reports both and does not reconcile them.
Swastik Desh Projects
The second operation, in the agencies' telling, sat next to the first. Swastik Desh Projects was a partnership firm, and the ED said it received Rs 203.50 crore diverted from the accounts of various Haryana departments. The list of senders is specific: Rs 70.26 crore from the Haryana State Pollution Control Board, Rs 38.47 crore from the Municipal Corporation of Panchkula, Rs 31.04 crore from the Haryana Rural Development Fund Administration Board, Rs 27.46 crore from HSSPP, Rs 15.50 crore from the Haryana Labour Welfare Board, Rs 10.39 crore from CREST and Rs 9.93 crore from the HPGCL Employees Pension Fund Trust. Abhay Kumar, his wife, her brother and his father, the ED says, allegedly received Rs 11.22 crore.
The state vigilance bureau's early figure for Swastik was higher. At the February news conference, its chief said nearly Rs 300 crore, more than half of the total fraud amount, was transferred into Swastik Desh Project's account. Later, the ED's complaint put it at Rs 203.50 crore. Early figures in a fast investigation are provisional by nature, and the reader should expect them to move. We return to that in the chapter on the numbers.
The pattern in the firm list
Read the four firms together and a pattern emerges that the CBI described in its first chargesheet: Rishi allegedly created and controlled shell entities, including Capco Fintech Services, RS Traders and SRR Planning Gurus Private Ltd, in the names of employees, drivers and relatives, and Abhay Kumar allegedly controlled and operated Swastik Desh Projects through his wife Swati Singla and brother-in-law Abhishek Singla, with over Rs 200 crore routed through it to third parties, including jewellers. By April, the Central Bureau of Investigation's own statement named the shell firms it was looking at, Swastik Desh Project, SRR Planning Gurus Pvt. Ltd., Cap Co Fintech Services, R.S. Traders and others, and estimated the loss to the public exchequer at more than Rs 550 crore.
The accused have not been convicted. The point of this chapter is narrower: the shape of the alleged scheme is a small number of firms with thin paper trails, controlled by or through people close to the two bankers. It does not take a forensic accountant to see why that structure would be attractive. It is the next chapter's job to explain how money could get out of government accounts and into such firms without the bank's systems objecting.
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