The hospital trust files

In May 2025, an FIR named the CEO of India's largest private bank in an alleged ₹2.05 crore bribery case. A year later, the Bombay High Court called the complaint a personal vendetta and threw it out. Both of those things happened. This chapter reports both, because the whole story is the story.

The allegation

The Lilavati Kirtilal Mehta Medical Trust - which runs Mumbai's Lilavati Hospital - through trustee Prashant Kishor Mehta, alleged that HDFC Bank MD & CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan accepted a bribe of ₹2.05 crore to help a group around former trustee Chetan Mehta retain "illegal control" of the trust. In April 2025 the trust applied to a magistrate for an investigation; on 29 May 2025 the Bandra magistrate directed an FIR under IPC sections 406, 409 and 420 (criminal breach of trust and cheating); on 31 May 2025, Bandra police registered it against Jagdishan and six former trustees, as the Indian Express reported. The trust also sought a CBI takeover of the probe, and publicly sought Jagdishan's removal, per NDTV.

The bank's answer

HDFC Bank called the allegations "baseless and malicious" and said it would pursue legal remedies against the Mehta family, per Business Standard. The context the bank pointed to: long-running recovery proceedings against Splendour Gems Limited - owned by Prashant Mehta's father, Kishore Mehta - which had defaulted on loans that stood at ₹65.22 crore as of 31 May 2025, tracing back to a DRT recovery certificate of ₹14.74 crore from October 2004. Jagdishan's counsel told the High Court the FIR was "retaliatory", and attacked the evidence as "a xerox copy of selective cash records" - a photocopied diary.

The court's verdict

On 5 May 2026, a Bombay High Court bench of Justices Makarand S Karnik and Nitin R Borkar quashed the FIR. The complaint was "not a bona fide complaint", the fallout of recovery proceedings, with "a personal vendetta writ large on the face of proceedings" - continuing the investigation would be "an abuse of the process of court", the Indian Express reported from the judgment. The court also declined to transfer the probe to the CBI and rejected the claim that recovery pressure had caused Kishore Mehta's death. (Three judges had earlier recused themselves, citing HDFC Bank shareholdings and past association with the trust.)

On 29 May 2026, the Supreme Court issued notice on the trust's challenge - but said it was "not presently inclined to interfere" with the quashing, while observing that allegations of personal benefit "may still require examination" and could be looked into by the investigating officers in the pending FIRs, per LiveLaw. And on 10 June 2026, the High Court dismissed the trust's interim plea in its ₹1,000-crore defamation suit against the bank, held the bank's statements "factually accurate", called the trustees' allegations "vexatious", and ordered ₹5 lakh in costs, per Moneycontrol.