The twenty-ninth of March
Published 3 October 2026
On Saturday, 29 March 2025, a senior IDFC First Bank executive sent an email to two of his superiors. It said the bank's Sector 32 branch was offering government clients interest rates the bank had never approved.
The sender and the recipients
The executive is Anish Kapur, the bank's regional head for government banking. His statement was recorded on 14 May 2026 under Section 180 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita at the CBI's camp office in Chandigarh, in the presence of a deputy superintendent of the CBI's Economic Offences-III branch, and ThePrint reviewed a copy. Kapur told the agency he sent the email to Guljiv Sawhney, business head of the bank's government banking division, and Abhijit Singh Toor, zonal head. It is part of the case file, marked MR No. 14, page 972.
Kapur said he had learnt that Rishi, then branch manager at Sector 32, and Abhay Kumar, a relationship manager in the bank's TASC team, were servicing government clients including Smart City Chandigarh, CREST and Haryana Power Generation Corporation Limited. He told the CBI that they were offering the clients "inflated (interest) rates not approved by the bank" against various deposit products, and that government funds of "huge amount" were being routed through a private tech company, Capco, which "raised serious suspicion".
Four concerns
Kapur told the CBI he listed four sets of concerns. The first was rates: letters that offered government clients interest rates not in line with the bank's card rates, with a letter "discreetly obtained" from HPGCL that did not mention FD rates, tenure or terms and conditions. He also said additional rates were being committed to departments without the bank's Treasury approving them.
The second was procedure. He said the bank's government business team was being "deliberately excluded" from discussions and that efforts were being made to hide rate commitments from Treasury and the government business team to avoid scrutiny. A vendor account of Capco, he said, was being used to route government transactions and "cover the gap amounts".
The third was risk to the bank. If an external audit or regulatory check found that the bank was offering unauthorised rates, it could have been blacklisted permanently from handling Haryana government funds. The fourth was influence: Kapur said HPGCL shared the letter in confidence, mainly through personal connections, because a colleague's husband was then HPGCL's managing director, and that Rishi had told HPGCL officials not to entertain Kapur's team so that the issue could be handled "officially". He added that there was a "high probability" that such practices were widespread across other government accounts.
What he asked for
Kapur told the CBI that he asked for an immediate internal investigation and audit of all government and TASC accounts opened by the Sector 32 branch, a check of the rate commitments and unauthorised vendor transactions, an examination of the Capco vendor account for "fraudulent adjustments", and urgent direction from senior management. He said the bank later held an internal inquiry that substantiated the allegations against Rishi and Abhay Kumar. Kumar, he said, was expelled on 10 June 2025 and Rishi on 5 August 2025.
Those two dates line up with the chronology in the ED's and the bank's records: Abhay Kumar's last day on 10 June and Rishi's on 5 August. They also leave a gap. ThePrint noted that Kapur's statement does not say what steps the bank took between his email and the expulsions, or whether the matter was reported to any regulator or agency.
Two ways to read the dates
The first reading is generous to the bank. An executive raised an alarm. The bank held an inquiry, removed one of the two people 73 days after the email and the other about four months after it. It then, on its own account, paid back the departments in full. The bank's stated position is that it was a victim: it told a CBI court it suffered a loss of about Rs 646 crore in principal, besides interest, after reimbursing government departments, and a prosecution-sanction order records the bank's position that it "is the victim of the fraud".
The second reading asks about the gap. If an executive had flagged "inflated rates", "unapproved commitments" and a suspicious vendor account in March 2025, and the departments' money kept moving out of the Sector 32 accounts after that date, a reader will want to know whether the bank's own control functions saw it in time. The CBI's own examples include a Rs 50 crore debit on 5 May 2025 and a Rs 5 crore debit two weeks later, both after Kapur's email. The CBI alleges further debits through January 2026. The sources reviewed here do not answer whether anything done in the interval limited those transfers.
ThePrint put detailed questions to the bank's managing director and its corporate communications team, asking whether the bank could confirm the email, whether the bank informed the RBI, the Haryana government or any agency, and how the email fits with the bank's plea in the Panchkula court to be treated as a victim. It had received no response at the time of publication on 2 October. This file will record the bank's response if it arrives.
Whatever the answer, the email is now the earliest dated internal warning in the public file. The next chapter takes the story through the summer of 2025 and the two exits.
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