The summer of attachments
Published 3 October 2026
The Enforcement Directorate's work is different from the CBI's. It does not ask who took the bribe. It asks where the money went and takes it back.
Thursday, 9 July, and Friday, 10 July
On 9 July the ED filed a prosecution complaint under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act naming 14 entities and persons. The next day it announced the attachment of assets valued at Rs 200.83 crore across the two banks' cases. The Tribune reported the order: the ED attached assets worth about Rs 200 crore in the IDFC First Bank and AU Small Finance Bank scam. Attachment is provisional. It freezes the asset pending adjudication, and the owner can contest it.
Friday, 21 August: the bail order
The most detailed public account of what the ED says it found is, oddly, a bail refusal. On 21 August a CBI court in Panchkula rejected the bail plea of Ribhav Rishi, described in the order as the alleged mastermind. The Tribune reported the court's recounting of the prosecution's case: 25 transactions worth Rs 187.35 crore attributed to him, Rs 2.52 lakh spent on a Goa trip, Rs 7.16 lakh at a Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, and Rs 18.32 crore moved to his wife.
These are the prosecution's contentions, accepted by a court only for the limited purpose of deciding that bail should not be granted at this stage. They are not findings of guilt. The sources reviewed for this file do not carry Rishi's response to these contentions.
What the bank's position was
While this went on, the bank's line stayed constant: the fraud was by a handful of employees and outsiders, the bank had paid the departments and absorbed the loss, and it was assisting the agencies. The line has been consistent since 22 February. Whether the bank's own controls should have caught it earlier is a question the agencies have raised and the bank has answered by pointing to collusion that defeated its maker-checker-authoriser system.
A fair chronology notes that no sourced document reviewed here alleges that the bank's senior management knew. The agencies' charges against bankers are of branch-level and regional staff. That position was stable through the summer, until September.
Get the next file
One email when a new file is published. No paid service needed.