Two exits and a letter
Published 3 October 2026
Summer 2025 is the stretch of this story where the formal record and the alleged conduct overlap, so each date needs to be held next to the other.
Tuesday, 10 June
Abhay Kumar's last day at the bank, according to the ED and the CBI, was Tuesday, 10 June 2025. The ED's court submission says he served as a relationship manager at the Sector 32 branch until 10 June 2025. Kapur's account to the CBI says the bank expelled him that day. The Haryana vigilance chief's version, at the February press conference, was that Kumar had "resigned in August last year". The sources reviewed here do not reconcile resignation and expulsion or June and August. The agencies' dated version is used in this file.
What the CBI alleges about what followed is the notable part. In its first chargesheet, the agency says that even after resigning on 10 June 2025, Abhay Kumar falsely projected himself as an authorised bank official and allegedly issued fabricated communications. The same chargesheet says the other officials passed payments without any cheques or debit notes, relying solely on verbal communication with other co-accused, and in some cases processed debit notes without making a call confirmation to the department concerned. If those allegations are borne out, they describe a system that kept honouring instructions from a person the bank had already removed.
Monday, 7 July: the finance department's letter
A month later, a different part of the machine moved. The Haryana Finance Department wrote to all department heads on Monday, 7 July 2025. ThePrint reported that the letter flagged non-compliance with account-opening guidelines and specifically called out Panchkula offices for opening accounts in Chandigarh without valid justification. Departments were asked to audit all accounts within 15 days and submit compliance reports by 30 July 2025. Whether those audits were carried out, ThePrint said, has not been confirmed publicly.
This letter should be read for what it is: a routine finance-department circular. It does not mention fraud, and nothing in the public record says its authors knew of one. But it contains the right question, asked in the right month, to every department that was about to become a victim. The CBI's examples of fraudulent transactions after 7 July include a Rs 25 crore AU Small Finance Bank debit on 29 December 2025 and a Rs 10 crore IDFC First debit on 14 January 2026. Whether the audits would have caught them is a counterfactual that cannot be answered from the file.
Tuesday, 5 August
Rishi's last day was Tuesday, 5 August 2025. In the bank's account, as quoted in the prosecution-sanction order reported by The Statesman, his exit was recorded as a case of misconduct after internal governance checks flagged suspicious high-value transactions. Kapur told the CBI that Rishi was expelled that day. The Haryana vigilance chief, in February, described Rishi as having headed the branch "until about six months ago", which is a looser version of the same date: February less six months is August.
The order and the bank's disclosure describe an internal system that worked in the sense that it flagged a person and removed him. They do not describe what the bank did next. The bank has said in its filings that it informed regulators and auditors in February 2026, after the discrepancy surfaced. The sources reviewed for this file contain no earlier regulatory disclosure by the bank and no statement that one did not occur. The silence is in the public record, not in this file's conclusions.
What an expulsion does not do
A branch manager's removal does not close the accounts he opened. The accounts of the departments remained at the Sector 32 branch. The CBI says the shell firms' accounts continued to be operated. Most important, the departments' own copies of the paperwork, the forged FDRs and edited statements, stayed on their shelves as if everything was in order. The investigators say that these documents were what made the departments' own records agree with the bank's lie.
That is the reason, on the agencies' telling, the fraud could survive both exits. It was no longer a manager's scheme running through a manager's access. It was a set of documents and accounts that did not need him present. The summer ends with both principals gone from the bank, and the money still in motion.
The next date in the chronology is September. It involves a new scheme, a new pair of accounts, and a rule that was about to be rewritten.
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