The money trail in March
Published 3 October 2026
By the second week of March the case had stopped being one FIR. It was an enforcement operation, a money-laundering inquiry and two further complaints, each with its own accounts, its own police and its own number.
Thursday, 12 March
The Enforcement Directorate raided 19 premises on 12 March across Chandigarh, Panchkula, Gurugram, Mohali and Bengaluru, and froze more than 100 bank accounts. The same day, a second FIR was registered in Chandigarh, on a complaint by officials of CREST, the Chandigarh Renewable Energy and Science and Technology Promotion Society, about suspicious and unauthorised transactions in its accounts at IDFC First's Sector 32 branch. The Indian Express reported that the Chandigarh Police SIT found 272 unauthorised transactions in one CREST account and 31 in another, none initiated or approved by CREST's accounts branch or authorised signatories, producing a shortfall of Rs 75.16 crore, with an additional interest impact of Rs 7.88 crore.
The CREST case had a feature that recurs throughout this file. The police told the court that bank statements received through official email IDs of certain bank officials appeared to match authorised balances, but original hard copies later obtained from the bank branch revealed discrepancies, indicating that the earlier statements had been forged. The email was one version of the truth, and the paper was another.
The Chandigarh Municipal Corporation and Smart City
A third matter surfaced in March, again at the same branch. The Statesman, quoting a prosecution-sanction order, said an FIR was registered that month on a complaint by the Municipal Commissioner alleging issuance of fake fixed deposit receipts worth more than Rs 116 crore and irregularities in accounts of the Municipal Corporation and Chandigarh Smart City Limited. The FDRs, the complaint said, did not appear in the bank's system and were suspected to be fake. They were purportedly issued in March and April 2025, when Rishi was branch manager. ThePrint's later report gave the figure as Rs 116.84 crore and noted that the matter had come to light only after an employee common to both cases stopped reporting for work following the exposure of the Haryana scam.
That is a third dataset, three weeks into the story, at the same branch, again involving the same manager. The number of separate complaints against the Sector 32 branch was now three, from three departments, in two jurisdictions.
The count
By 15 March, Hindustan Times counted 12 arrests: six bank employees, four private individuals, one government official and the jeweller, with 11 of the accused in judicial custody. It listed what the bureau had found: raids at 16 locations, over 25 electronic devices seized, six luxury vehicles and 10 properties identified. Rishi had, per the report, resigned from the bank in June 2025. The bank's own record, and the ED's, gives 5 August. This is another place where the sources disagree on a date and this file follows the agencies.
The hotelier's version
Among the arrested was Vikram Wadhwa, who had been on the run since the scam surfaced. He was intercepted in Kharar and sent on five-day police remand to trace what the report called a money trail spanning over 2,400 transactions. In his disclosure statement, he said Rishi had approached him with a proposal to route government funds through his companies, and the money went into real estate entities he named, among them Prisma Residency LLP, Kinspire Realty LLP and Martell Buildwell LLP. The ED later attached properties in Sectors 33-C and 21-C of Chandigarh that it linked to him.
Wadhwa's account is the nearest the file gets to the inside of the arrangement. It is also an account by an accused person in custody, offered to investigators, with every incentive attached to such statements. It is reproduced because it is in the record and because the agencies relied on it, not because it is established.
What March settled
March settled the geography. This was no longer a Haryana case with one bank. It was three FIRs and two state police forces, an ED probe and, by the end of the month, a demand that a single agency take it all. The state government made that request, and on 8 April the CBI registered its own FIR. We turn to that and to the bank's first quarterly accounts since the discovery.
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