The manager arrives
Published 3 October 2026
Every banking fraud that gets a name starts as an ordinary Friday. This one starts on Friday, 21 April 2023, when, according to the Enforcement Directorate's account of the case, a man named Ribhav Rishi began work as branch manager of IDFC First Bank's Sector 32 branch in Chandigarh.
A word on method before the story starts. Everything below is alleged. The accused have not been convicted of anything in the cases described here, and several of them are contesting the charges. Where an account comes from an investigating agency, a court filing or an accused person's own statement, this file says so and links the report. Where the bank has said something, the bank's version is stated beside it. The point of a chronology is to let the dates argue; the file does not add adjectives.
The date and the desk
The ED told a Panchkula court in May that Rishi worked as branch manager at the Sector 32 branch from 21 April 2023 to 5 August 2025. That is a little over twenty-eight months. The bank's own records, as quoted in a later prosecution-sanction order, say he left on 5 August 2025, with his exit recorded as misconduct after internal governance checks flagged suspicious high-value transactions. Hold both dates. The first is when the investigators say the work began. The second is when the bank says it ended. Everything this story is about happened between them, and a good deal of it happened after.
The branch itself was not a place the public would have noticed. Sector 32 is one of the planned sectors of Chandigarh, and the branch of a private bank there would normally deal in the everyday business of the city: salary accounts, loans, current accounts for shopkeepers. What the investigators say made this branch unusual is who its customers turned out to be. At least eight Haryana government departments, including the panchayats department and the pollution control board, had money parked here that was supposed to sit in fixed deposits. The state's departments are headquartered across the border in Panchkula, in Haryana. The branch is in Chandigarh, a Union Territory. The Haryana anti-corruption chief would later say, in a news conference, that he found it surprising that the bank's branch is in Chandigarh while the government departments are in state territory.
The people around the desk
A branch manager does not work alone, and the ED's account of the people near Rishi is the most unusual part of the file. His personal assistant, Bhupinder Singh, told the agency that Rishi had employed him in October 2023 and lured him by offering an additional fixed monthly amount if he opened a firm in his name. The ED says Bhupinder then signed blank cheques and RTGS forms and handed them back to Rishi, and collected and delivered cash on instruction. A second person, Sapna, told the ED that Rishi had persuaded her husband to open an LIC policy in her name and kept her identity documents and photographs. She said she did not know she had been made a partner in a firm, and that she is illiterate. Her husband, Hemraj, who was Rishi's driver, said that in September 2023 he gave his KYC documents to Rishi on the pretext of opening an LIC policy, though he admitted signing bank documents, blank cheques and RTGS forms in bulk at Rishi's direction.
These are statements the ED placed before a court. They are the agency's case, recorded through the people it says were used. They have not been tested at trial. Read them as the prosecution's opening shape of the story: a manager, a driver, a driver's wife, a personal assistant, and a series of documents signed by people who, on this telling, did not understand what they were signing.
Alongside Rishi there was a second figure. Abhay Kumar was a relationship manager at the same branch, serving until 10 June 2025. The ED says he ran a separate shell firm, Swastik Desh Projects, through his family. Its partners were his wife, Swati Singla, with 75 per cent, and his brother-in-law, Abhishek Singla, with 25 per cent. The Haryana anti-corruption chief, A S Chawla, described the pair of former employees as the alleged "masterminds" and noted that Abhay Kumar had resigned in August 2025 by his account, while the ED and the CBI give 10 June. The sources do not agree on the month, and this file will keep using the agencies' date and flag the discrepancy where it matters.
A real estate man from Malout
There is also a third line of the story, and it comes from a man who is now in custody. Vikram Wadhwa, 52, a Chandigarh hotelier and real estate developer, was arrested in Kharar, near Mohali, in March. According to Hindustan Times's account of his disclosure statement, Wadhwa told investigators that Rishi had proposed routing government funds through companies he controlled, with an assurance that "reverse entries could be made into the government accounts whenever required". Wadhwa claimed the arrangement began around 2023-24, with the money flowing into real estate ventures in Chandigarh, Mohali and Kharar.
The same report gives a biography that reads like a Hindi film script: Wadhwa, originally from Malout in southwest Punjab, moved to Chandigarh in the 1990s as a guesthouse caretaker on a monthly salary of Rs 1,500 and went on to build a real estate business. He said he knew Rishi's father, Rakesh Kumar Rishi, who had introduced him to the son. A disclosure statement is a claim by an accused person made to the agency. In court it carries limits, and it is the agency's allegation as much as the accused's. What it adds to the chronology is a date range: 2023-24, which is when the manager arrived.
What the bank later said about this period
IDFC First Bank's managing director, V Vaidyanathan, said in February, when the fraud became public, that the bank had "been in operation for over 10 years" and had rolled out "over 1,000 branches" with "no such incident before". He said the incident was isolated and that the controls, "maker, checker and authoriser", had failed because of collusion. Keep that sentence. The rest of this file is, in a sense, an extended footnote to it.
For now the story has a manager, an assistant, a driver, a driver's wife, a relationship manager and a developer, and a branch that had not yet received the government's money. The next step in the chronology is the one that brought the money to the branch: a bid, a notification, and a cap.
Get the next file
One email when a new file is published. No paid service needed.