From BluSmart’s Puneet To RCom’s Punit: Directors Who Treat Company Funds As Personal Piggy Banks

There is a particular kind of entrepreneurial genius that business schools do not teach, venture capital firms do not fund in their pitch decks, and regulators do not celebrate in their annual reports. It is the genius, apparently possessed by a remarkable number of Indian founders and corporate directors, of looking at a company’s balance sheet — full of investor capital, public sector bank loans, and shareholder money — and seeing not the foundation of a business enterprise, but a rather convenient personal expense account with unusually generous limits.

India’s startup ecosystem has produced extraordinary companies, genuine wealth creators, and legitimate business innovators. It has also, if the enforcement dockets of SEBI, the Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau of Investigation, and the courts are to be believed, produced a parallel economy of executives who appear to have approached corporate governance with the same cavalier spirit one might bring to an all-inclusive resort; where the budget is technically someone else’s money, the rules are technically someone else’s problem, and the company’s treasury — is technically open all night.

What follows is not a celebration of these individuals, nor a condemnation that outstrips what the law itself has already documented. It is, rather, an attempt to make sense of a pattern that has emerged with enough frequency and enough colour across Indian corporate history to deserve careful, honest, and — forgive the editorial indulgence — occasionally wry examination. Every allegation cited here originates from official regulatory orders, enforcement agency press releases, court records, or auditor findings. The facts, as documented, are extraordinary enough without embellishment.

Part One: The Art of the Invisible Transfer — Gensol Engineering and the Jaggi Brothers

Let us begin, as one often must in a story about extraordinary expenses, with a golf set.

According to SEBI’s interim order issued in April 2025, Gensol Engineering — a solar energy and electric vehicle leasing company listed on Indian stock exchanges — had, among other alleged financial irregularities, seen its company funds applied toward the purchase of a golf set costing approximately ₹26 lakh. This is not a typo. Twenty-six lakh rupees, in the currency of a country where the median annual household income hovers around ₹2.5 lakh, was reportedly charged to a company whose stated purpose was advancing India’s green energy and EV transition.

Gensol Engineering was promoted by brothers Puneet Singh Jaggi and Anmol Singh Jaggi, who had, to their credit, built what appeared on paper to be a credible story: a solar engineering firm that had pivoted into EV leasing, deploying electric cars for platforms like BluSmart (the ride-hailing company co-founded by Puneet), financed by loans from state-backed lenders including IREDA and PFC totalling approximately ₹978 crore. The story was compelling enough to attract institutional investors, achieve a public listing, and sustain a market capitalisation that reflected genuine investor faith in India’s electric vehicle future.

What SEBI’s forensic investigators allege they found, however, was something considerably less inspiring. According to the order, loan funds intended for purchasing electric vehicles were allegedly diverted and routed not to EV acquisitions but to promoter-linked entities and, in some cases, directly to accounts connected to the Jaggi family’s personal affairs. The alleged diversions, as SEBI documents them, include a luxury 3-4 bedroom apartment at DLF Camellias in Gurugram — a residential address where the entry fee alone runs to several crores — purchased, the regulator alleges, with company money.

SEBI’s order does not deploy diplomatic restraint in its characterisation of these alleged activities. It describes Gensol as having been used as the promoters’ “personal piggy bank” — a phrase that, one imagines, the legal department at SEBI drafted with a certain grim satisfaction. Auditors found approximately ₹115 crore unaccounted for within the Gensol ecosystem. By July 2025, SEBI had upheld its interim orders, barring both Puneet and Anmol Jaggi from participating in the securities markets, noting that they had failed to convincingly rebut the evidence presented.

The consequences for BluSmart — the EV ride-hailing company that had genuinely attracted the admiration of Indian urban commuters and the investment capital of global funds including Tiger Global — were swift and dismal. The company suspended its operations, citing what it described as a “temporary” pause for compliance matters. For thousands of drivers whose livelihoods depended on the platform, the pause was rather less temporary than advertised. For investors who had committed capital on the strength of the green energy narrative, it was a considerable education in the relationship between a compelling story and a reliable balance sheet.

The Enforcement Directorate subsequently detained Puneet Jaggi for questioning under FEMA — India’s Foreign Exchange Management Act, which governs cross-border fund flows — and media reports indicated that the agency was in the process of building a case under PMLA, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, whose provisions carry the kind of consequences that make an ordinary securities market ban look like a mild inconvenience.

The Gensol case is, in a sense, a modern parable about the intersection of genuine opportunity and alleged governance failure. Electric vehicles are real. India’s energy transition is real. The infrastructure investment required to make it happen is real. The tragedy — if one may use the word for what is, after all, an alleged fraud — is that the investors and lenders who funded this vision did not necessarily fund what they believed they were funding.

Part Two: From Telecom Towers to Manhattan Condominiums — The RCom Saga and Punit Garg

If the Gensol story has the quality of a cautionary start-up fable, the Reliance Communications chapter reads, as the original article rightly observes, more like a dark crime novel. A slow-burning one, at that, set across three countries and featuring financial instruments that would require a specialist in structured finance to fully appreciate.

Reliance Communications, the telecom company that was once a crown jewel of the Anil Ambani group, collapsed under a debt burden so enormous — exceeding ₹40,000 crore in loans from Indian public sector banks — that its insolvency became a defining episode in Indian corporate history. Thousands of employees lost jobs. Creditors recovered fractions of what they were owed. Ordinary people lost savings invested in the company’s securities.

Into this wreckage, the Enforcement Directorate alleges, stepped Punit Garg — a long-serving RCom executive who, according to ED’s investigation and court records, appears to have identified in his company’s collapse not a professional catastrophe to be managed but an opportunity to be quietly exploited.

The ED alleges that Garg used an RCom subsidiary to acquire a luxury condominium in Manhattan — New York City’s most expensive borough, where real estate prices make even Gurugram’s DLF Camellias look modestly priced. This was, allegedly, a corporate asset: a property held in the company’s name, financed with company money. So far, one might argue, so standard in the universe of multinational corporate property holding.

What allegedly happened next, however, takes the story from corporate real estate into something considerably more dramatic. When RCom’s insolvency proceedings began — when the creditors and resolution professionals began the painstaking task of cataloguing every asset that might be sold to partially repay the company’s enormous debts — the Manhattan apartment, according to ED, was quietly sold. The proceeds, valued at approximately $8.3 million, were then allegedly not returned to the insolvency estate as the property of a company in creditor proceedings, but were instead routed through a transaction in Dubai and ultimately landed, via what the ED characterises as bogus contractual arrangements, in destinations considerably more personal.

The ED’s documentation of this alleged scheme is characteristically thorough. About ₹70 crore from the sale is alleged to have been laundered to the UAE through sham agreements. The apartment’s rental income — approximately $36,560 annually, which in Indian rupees represents a comfortable upper-middle-class annual salary — was allegedly directed into Garg’s personal use rather than into the company’s accounts. And approximately $40,486 of what the ED characterises as proceeds of crime was used, according to its filings, to pay the college tuition fees of Garg’s daughters at American universities.

It is at this point that one feels the need to pause and acknowledge the sheer audacity of what is alleged. Public sector banks — SBI, Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank, and others whose depositors include schoolteachers, small shopkeepers, and retired government employees — had lent RCom enormous sums that were never recovered. And allegedly embedded in the financial flows that followed that collapse was a transaction that paid for a director’s children’s university education in the United States. The ED’s official communications noted, with what one can only describe as institutional dry wit, that these payments constituted “Proceeds of Crime.”

Garg was arrested on January 29, 2026 under PMLA. A special court granted the ED nine days of custody — noting, among other things, that Garg was a potential flight risk, given that his wife and daughter were residing abroad. This detail, somehow, completes the picture with a kind of grim economy.

Part Three: The ₹83 Crore Question — BharatPe and the Ashneer Grover Controversy

If the previous two cases involved the kind of elaborate, multi-jurisdictional financial architecture that requires forensic accountants and international legal assistance to unravel, the BharatPe story is, in a certain sense, more relatable. Not in the sense that any of it is defensible, but in the sense that the mechanisms alleged — fake vendor invoices, inflated expense reimbursements, family members on implausible payrolls — are the kind of corporate misconduct that auditors have been trained to look for since the invention of the double-entry bookkeeping system.

BharatPe, the fintech startup that grew to significant scale on the back of its QR-code payment infrastructure for small merchants, became one of India’s most talked-about unicorns. Its co-founder Ashneer Grover became, through a combination of genuine business aggression and a memorable television presence as a judge on Shark Tank India, arguably the most recognisable startup founder face in the country.

The board of BharatPe, however, had a somewhat different assessment of his activities. Following a forensic audit commissioned by the company’s board and conducted by Alvarez & Marsal, the company publicly accused Grover, along with members of his family employed at the firm, of “cheating and embezzlement.” The audit, according to BharatPe’s own public statements, identified fake vendor invoices worth approximately ₹83 crore, through which company funds were allegedly siphoned to parties connected to the Grover family.

The specifics, as reported from the audit findings, have a certain extravagance to them. A ₹10 crore dining table — the kind of statement furniture that announces its owner’s priorities with the subtlety of a brass band — allegedly appeared on company accounts. Lavish family holidays, designer purchases, and restaurant bills that would embarrass a moderately successful hedge fund manager were allegedly processed through BharatPe’s expense infrastructure. Family members were allegedly placed on the payroll in roles whose contribution to the company’s merchant payment network was, charitably, difficult to quantify.

Grover, for his part, has contested the findings vigorously and the matter is subject to ongoing litigation. BharatPe filed a civil suit seeking to recover approximately ₹83 crore. The legal process, as it tends to do, continues its measured pace through India’s court system.

What makes the BharatPe episode instructive beyond its specific facts is what it reveals about governance in high-growth startups. BharatPe was not a small, informal outfit operating out of a co-working space. It was a venture-capital-backed company with institutional investors, a professional board, and a human resources infrastructure. 

Part Four: The Numbers Never Existed — GoMechanic and the Confession That Wasn’t Expected

Among all the examples in this taxonomy of alleged corporate self-service, the GoMechanic story occupies a particular category. Here, unlike the cases involving complex multi-party diversions and offshore transactions, the admission was startlingly, almost refreshingly direct.

GoMechanic, the automotive services startup that built a network of car service centres across Indian cities and attracted investment from Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India, and Orios Venture Partners, was revealed in early 2023 to have significantly inflated its revenue figures. The company’s co-founder Amit Bhasin, in a LinkedIn post that appeared to combine a public confession with a plea for understanding, acknowledged that the company had “made mistakes” in its financial reporting.

The investigation that followed was less sentimental. Auditors and investors found that the company’s reported revenues were substantially overstated — not by the small margin that might result from aggressive but arguable accounting interpretations, but by a magnitude that called the fundamental integrity of the company’s financial reporting into question. The company subsequently underwent a significant restructuring, with a substantial portion of its workforce laid off.

The GoMechanic case is somewhat different in character from the others in this article because the primary allegation concerns financial misrepresentation rather than direct personal enrichment through fund diversion. But as report notes, cooking the books is frequently a gateway to personal gain — because overstated revenues support inflated valuations, inflated valuations support the founder’s equity being valued at extraordinary levels, and that equity is ultimately exchangeable for real money. The personal enrichment, in other words, can be structural rather than transactional, but it is no less real for that.

For the investors who put capital into GoMechanic in reliance on its reported financial performance, the distinction between “our money was used to fund a founder’s lifestyle directly” and “our money was invested in a company whose valuation was based on fictional numbers” was perhaps less meaningful than the fact that the outcome — significant financial loss — was the same.

Part Five: Wings, Whims, and a ₹9,000 Crore Default — Vijay Mallya and the Kingfisher Story

No survey of corporate India’s most creative fund management would be complete without acknowledging Vijay Mallya, who predates the startup generation but whose case established many of the patterns that subsequent actors appear to have studied, if not necessarily as cautionary tales.

Kingfisher Airlines, the carrier that Mallya founded and ran with a flamboyance that extended to naming aircraft after himself and hosting launch parties that were widely described as the most spectacular the Indian aviation industry had ever seen, collapsed in 2012 owing approximately ₹9,000 crore to a consortium of Indian banks. The airline’s operating losses were substantial and documented. What made the case particularly significant, however, were the allegations that accompanied the insolvency.

The Enforcement Directorate’s investigation, drawing on the reports of banking authorities and forensic auditors, alleged that funds from bank loans extended to Kingfisher Airlines were diverted to related entities — including companies associated with the United Breweries group — through a web of transactions that the ED characterised as constituting money laundering. The scale of the alleged diversion was significant enough that Mallya, who relocated to the United Kingdom in 2016, became the subject of an extradition request — a legal process that continues to progress, at the measured pace one has come to expect from bilateral extradition proceedings, through the UK court system.

The public bank loans that allegedly funded Mallya’s enterprise — and, according to ED’s allegations, various of his personal and business interests — came from institutions including State Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, and Bank of Baroda. These are banks that hold the savings and service the loan accounts of millions of ordinary Indian citizens. When their funds are alleged to have been misused, the victims are not an abstract category of institutional investors but, in a very real sense, every depositor who has ever placed money in those institutions in reliance on their safety.

Mallya himself has contested the allegations, characterising his situation as a commercial dispute rather than a criminal matter. The courts, in India and in the UK, continue to form their own views.

Part Six: The Housing Finance Heist — DHFL and the Wadhawan Brothers

If Kingfisher established the pattern of a flamboyant founder allegedly redirecting institutional funds, the Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL) case demonstrates how the same basic architecture can be applied with considerably more technical sophistication and at considerably greater scale.

DHFL, once one of India’s largest housing finance companies, collapsed in 2019 after auditors and journalists began documenting an extraordinary story. The company’s promoters — Kapil Wadhawan and Dheeraj Wadhawan — were subsequently accused by the ED, the CBI, and the RBI-appointed administrator of orchestrating one of the largest financial frauds in Indian corporate history.

The scale of the alleged diversion is difficult to comprehend in ordinary terms: approximately ₹34,000 crore, according to the CBI’s chargesheet, allegedly siphoned from the company through a network of shell companies and related-party entities. DHFL had borrowed heavily from mutual funds, public sector banks, and — most poignantly — from depositors who had trusted a housing finance company with their savings. When the company’s collapse froze these funds, the human consequences were immediate and severe.

What is alleged to have happened to the diverted funds, according to enforcement agency filings, illustrates the same pattern visible in smaller cases — real estate investments, offshore accounts, personal luxury spending — simply at a scale that required proportionally more elaborate financial engineering to execute. Shell companies with generic names and minimal actual business activity allegedly served as conduits. Loans were allegedly made to entities that had no plausible basis for receiving them, routed through multiple layers of transactions designed to obscure the ultimate destination.

Both Wadhawan brothers were arrested and have been in legal proceedings since 2020. The insolvency process has resulted in asset recoveries that represent a fraction of what lenders and depositors are owed.

Part Seven: The Homebuyers’ Nightmare — Amrapali Group

There is a particular moral weight to cases where the alleged misuse of funds affects not institutional investors or professional creditors, but ordinary families who trusted a company with what is, for most middle-class Indians, the largest financial commitment of their lives: a home purchase.

The Amrapali Group, promoted by Anil Kumar Sharma and his associates, collected thousands of crores from homebuyers across the Delhi-NCR region in advance payments for apartments that were promised, under various project timelines, and not delivered. The scale of the undelivered promises — involving tens of thousands of families who had paid substantial sums for homes that existed, for years, primarily as brochures and construction sites — became a matter of public outcry significant enough to reach the Supreme Court of India directly.

The Supreme Court, exercising its extraordinary jurisdiction, took over the matter and appointed a court receiver to manage the completion of Amrapali’s stalled projects. What its investigation and the National Buildings Construction Corporation’s subsequent work revealed was an elaborate system of alleged fund diversion: money collected from homebuyers for specific housing projects had allegedly been moved to related entities, personal accounts, and non-project uses.

Sharma was arrested, and the court proceedings have included findings — stated in judicial orders rather than merely in investigation filings — that the money of homebuyers was misused in ways that had nothing to do with constructing the homes for which it was collected. The Supreme Court’s intervention has ensured that the projects are being completed, albeit on a delayed and court-supervised timeline. For the families involved, however, the years of uncertainty, the financial strain of simultaneously servicing home loans and paying rent, and the emotional toll of an unrealised promise represent costs that no legal settlement fully addresses.

Part Eight: The Education Startup’s Expanding Balance Sheet — Byju’s and the Governance Concerns

It would be professionally negligent, in a survey of this kind, to omit Byju’s — the ed-tech company that became India’s most valuable startup and subsequently became the subject of regulatory attention, lender disputes, and governance concerns of a scale proportionate to its extraordinary rise.

The Enforcement Directorate’s investigation into Byju’s, formally known as Think & Learn Private Limited, focused on alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Management Act. The ED, following searches at the company’s premises in 2023, alleged that foreign direct investment worth over ₹28,000 crore received by the company had been irregularly deployed, with portions allegedly transferred to offshore entities in contravention of FEMA regulations.

The company’s founder, Byju Raveendran, has been the subject of ED summons and questioning in connection with the investigation. The company, simultaneously, has been battling disputes with lenders — including an American lending syndicate that accelerated repayment of a $1.2 billion term loan — and with the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which suspended the brand’s sponsorship of the Indian cricket team jersey following non-payment of sponsorship fees.

The Byju’s case is complex and multi-layered in ways that distinguish it from straightforward fund diversion — the company’s difficulties appear to involve a combination of aggressive growth expenditure, governance failures, and alleged regulatory violations rather than the simpler narrative of personal enrichment that characterises some other cases in this piece. Nevertheless, the scale of the alleged FEMA violations, combined with the contrast between the amounts raised from investors and the company’s subsequent inability to meet its financial obligations, has made it one of the most scrutinised governance failures in Indian startup history.

At its peak, Byju’s was valued at $22 billion — a figure that reflected not just investor enthusiasm for ed-tech but a specific confidence that the company’s reported growth metrics and financial management could sustain that valuation. The subsequent events have prompted inevitable questions about what, precisely, was happening to the capital that investors deployed in that confidence.

Part Nine: The Cooperative Bank and the Housing Finance Company — PMC Bank and HDIL

For sheer regulatory and human consequences, the Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank (PMC Bank) crisis of 2019 deserves detailed examination. The case connects, in a way that illustrates the interconnected nature of Indian financial misconduct, to the DHFL story through one of its central characters: the Wadhawan family.

PMC Bank, a cooperative bank with a depositor base of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in Maharashtra, was found by the Reserve Bank of India in 2019 to have concealed its true exposure to Housing Development and Infrastructure Limited (HDIL) — a real estate company promoted by Rakesh Kumar Wadhawan (father of the DHFL promoters) and his son Sarang Wadhawan. The bank, under its managing director Joy Thomas and with the alleged complicity of HDIL’s promoters, had created dummy accounts to conceal the true extent of HDIL loans — which amounted to approximately ₹6,500 crore, representing more than 70% of the bank’s total loan book. The loans, for the most part, had not been repaid.

The RBI’s intervention froze depositor accounts, initially limiting withdrawals to ₹1,000 and later increasing the limit in stages — but for thousands of depositors who had placed their savings, their retirement funds, and their emergency reserves in the bank, the months of restricted access created genuine financial hardship. Stories of patients who could not access funds for medical treatment, families who could not meet school fee deadlines, and small businesspeople who could not pay suppliers became a significant part of the public record of the crisis.

Both Rakesh and Sarang Wadhawan were arrested. Joy Thomas surrendered to authorities. The bank’s resolution process has proceeded through the RBI’s oversight, but the recovery for depositors has been protracted and partial.

A Brief Taxonomy of the Mechanisms Employed

Having surveyed the specific cases, it is instructive to step back and notice that, beneath the individual details — the golf sets and Manhattan condominiums and college tuition payments and fake vendor invoices — there is a surprisingly limited repertoire of mechanisms through which company funds are allegedly transformed into personal assets. Corporate creativity, it turns out, has its limits even in this particular domain.

The first and most direct mechanism is the personal expense on the company account. This is the simplest form, requiring nothing more than the authority to approve expenses and the confidence — or perhaps the indifference — to charge personal consumption to a corporate line item. Golf sets. Dining tables. Family holidays. Designer purchases. This mechanism is unsophisticated but apparently effective until an auditor or a whistleblower takes a close look at the receipts.

The second mechanism involves related-party transactions: routing company funds to entities owned by or associated with the founder, their family, or their associates, typically through contracts for services that may be fictitious, inflated, or otherwise unjustifiable at arm’s length. This is the alleged mechanism in both the Gensol and BharatPe cases, and it requires slightly more architectural planning — a company to receive the funds, a plausible-sounding service description, and an invoice that passes a first-level review.

The third mechanism is asset conversion: the use of company funds to acquire real assets — typically real estate, but sometimes vehicles, art, or other stores of value — which are nominally corporate property but which serve, through occupation, rental income, or eventual sale, the personal interests of the insider. This is the alleged mechanism in both the Gensol apartment and the RCom Manhattan condominium cases, and it has the virtue, from the perpetrator’s perspective, of being relatively deniable until the disposition of the asset is traced.

The fourth mechanism is financial statement manipulation — GoMechanic’s alleged territory — where the fraud is not the direct theft of funds but the creation of a fictitious financial picture that inflates valuation, enables further fundraising, and ultimately enriches insiders through equity appreciation rather than expense reimbursement. This mechanism is arguably the most corrosive in long-term systemic terms because it corrodes the entire informational infrastructure on which investment decisions are based.

The fifth, and most elaborate, mechanism is offshore routing: the use of international financial channels — typically involving UAE or offshore financial centres — to move money across borders in ways that frustrate domestic regulators. This is alleged in the RCom, Kingfisher, and DHFL cases, and it is the mechanism that triggers FEMA violations and PMLA proceedings, because international fund flows are monitored by financial intelligence units that can cooperate across borders in ways that domestic investigators cannot.

The Regulators Who Are, Finally, Watching

It would be ungracious, and inaccurate, to leave the impression that India’s regulatory architecture is simply a passive audience for this theatre. SEBI, the Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Reserve Bank of India, and India’s court system have — in every case documented in this article — eventually taken action, though late, many a times! The question worth examining is not whether action was taken, but whether the timing and the mechanisms are adequate to the scale of the problem.

SEBI’s authority is, by its design, market-focused. It can bar individuals from securities markets, mandate forensic audits, freeze trading accounts, and issue public orders that damage reputations and restrict capital market access. What it cannot do is imprison anyone — that jurisdiction belongs to criminal courts, accessed through the CBI or the ED. SEBI’s deterrent value is therefore primarily economic and reputational, which may be sufficient for a sophisticated market participant but is manifestly insufficient for someone who has already decided that the benefits of plunder exceed the costs of market exclusion.

The Enforcement Directorate, by contrast, has teeth with a very different bite. PMLA proceedings, as those accused in money laundering cases have discovered, carry the possibility of lengthy detention, asset attachment, and custodial interrogation that no securities market ban can replicate.

The ED’s strategy — trace every rupee, frame every personal expense as a proceed of crime, and use custody as a pressure mechanism — is aggressive to the point where civil liberties advocates have raised concerns about its application. That debate is real and important. What is also real is that in cases like Punit Garg’s, where the alleged laundering extended across international jurisdictions and involved the systematic conversion of corporate assets into personal wealth, aggressive investigation is arguably proportionate to the scale of the alleged offence.

The RBI’s supervisory function has the potential to be the most preventive of all the regulatory mechanisms, because it operates before fraud escalates to the point of requiring criminal prosecution. The PMC Bank case, however, suggests that RBI supervision has its limits when regulated entities are systematically concealing information — an auditing challenge that no regulatory framework can fully solve as long as the humans preparing the accounts are motivated to deceive.

What India’s enforcement architecture is gradually developing, case by case, is a doctrine that treats personal enrichment from corporate funds not as a civil matter between companies and their shareholders, but as a criminal enterprise with consequences that include imprisonment, asset forfeiture, and international cooperation. The extradition proceedings against Mallya, though slow, demonstrate that offshore retreat is not the permanent escape it once appeared to be. The nine-day custody granted to the ED in Garg’s case demonstrates that courts are willing to support aggressive investigation. And SEBI’s public naming of Gensol as a “personal piggy bank” demonstrates that India’s market regulator is increasingly willing to use the language of moral condemnation alongside the language of legal sanction.

The Governance Failure Beneath the Individual Crime

It is tempting, when cataloguing these cases, to focus on the individual actors — their choices, their apparent moral reasoning (or absence thereof), their specific alleged acts. But the more important question is structural: how do these situations develop, and what systemic failures allow them to persist long enough to reach the scale that triggers regulatory attention?

The honest answer involves several uncomfortable observations. The first is that early-stage and high-growth companies operate in a governance environment that is, almost by design, tilted toward the founder. Venture capital investment is premised on the insight that the founder’s vision and execution capability are the primary value driver, which creates strong incentives for investors to give founders the operating latitude they need to move fast. The dark side of this latitude is that it creates conditions under which a founder who chooses to misuse it can do so for considerable time before institutional checks engage.

The second uncomfortable observation is that auditors — the professionals whose entire institutional function is to verify that a company’s financial statements accurately represent its affairs — have, in many of these cases, apparently failed to detect the patterns that subsequent forensic investigators found relatively quickly once they were actually looking. This is partly a function of audit methodology, which is sampling-based and therefore imperfect. It is also, in some cases, a function of auditor selection: companies choose their own auditors, pay their fees, and have a meaningful influence on the relationship. The structural conflict of interest in statutory auditing has been widely documented in academic literature. The cases in this article provide it with vivid illustrations.

The third observation is about the culture of disclosure in India’s startup ecosystem. Companies that are losing money — as most startups do, for extended periods, by design — must construct compelling narratives for investors about why current losses are investments in future growth rather than evidence of fundamental business model failure. This narrative construction, pursued with sufficient enthusiasm, can lead to a slippage between the story told to investors and the financial reality being managed by the leadership team. GoMechanic’s revenue inflation is, in this sense, an extreme expression of a tendency that exists at lower intensity across many fundraising narratives.

None of these structural observations justify what the accused in these cases are alleged to have done. But they do suggest that the solution is not merely the prosecution of individual bad actors — necessary as that is — but a systemic improvement in governance infrastructure, audit quality, investor oversight, and regulatory early-warning systems that can identify concerning patterns before they evolve from governance failures into criminal enterprises.

What the Victims Actually Lost?

There is a risk, in writing about corporate fraud with the kind of analytical detachment that the topic’s complexity seems to require, of losing sight of the human dimension. These are not abstract regulatory violations. They are events with real human consequences, and accounting for those consequences honestly is part of intellectual integrity on the subject.

The depositors of PMC Bank who could not access their savings for months — some of whom reportedly died during the period of account freeze, having been unable to withdraw funds for medical treatment — were not participants in a financial market who could be expected to absorb investment risk. They were ordinary people who had placed their trust in what they reasonably believed to be a supervised, safe institution.

The homebuyers of Amrapali who paid for apartments that were not built, who serviced home loans on properties they could not occupy, who spent years in legal proceedings and in temporary accommodation, were not institutional investors with risk-adjusted return expectations. They were families who saved and borrowed and hoped, and were disappointed in ways that affected their daily lives for years.

The BluSmart drivers who found their platform suspended and their livelihood interrupted were not equity investors who could absorb the loss of a startup bet. They were workers who had built their professional lives around a platform in good faith, and who discovered that the platform’s ethical infrastructure was apparently not as solid as its electric vehicle fleet.

The public sector bank employees, credit officers, and senior managers who will face questions about why their institutions lent such large sums to companies whose subsequent conduct suggests they were not managed with the prudence that loan sanctioning requires — these people operate under their own institutional pressures and limitations, and are not individually culpable for systemic failures. But the banks themselves, whose capital comes ultimately from depositors and taxpayers, absorb losses that are not abstract but concrete.

In every case on this list, behind the regulatory orders and the enforcement press releases and the court hearings, are people who lost something real. That is worth holding in view as the legal machinery — slowly, methodically, sometimes frustratingly slowly — processes these cases toward their eventual resolutions.

Conclusion: On the Relationship Between Ambition and Accountability

India’s startup and corporate ecosystem has produced genuine transformations of everyday life for hundreds of millions of people. Digital payments have reached villages that commercial banks did not serve for decades. E-commerce has brought market access to micro-entrepreneurs in Tier-3 cities. Ed-tech, however contested its outcomes, has genuinely expanded access to learning resources for students who could not previously access them. Electric mobility, however tarnished by the Gensol story, represents a real and important future for Indian transportation.

The individuals whose alleged conduct is documented in this article are not the avatars of all of Indian enterprise. They are, the evidence suggests, people who allowed personal ambition to overwhelm professional ethics, who mistook the access to other people’s money for the right to spend it as their own, and who — perhaps most fundamentally — underestimated the patience and eventual effectiveness of the regulatory and enforcement systems that govern financial conduct in a democratic country.

The regulators and enforcement agencies that are, in 2025 and 2026, bringing these cases to resolution deserve recognition for persistence if not always for speed. SEBI’s willingness to use the language of moral condemnation alongside legal sanction, the ED’s capacity to pursue complex, multi-jurisdictional financial investigations, and the courts’ growing familiarity with the technical dimensions of financial fraud are all indicators that India’s institutional infrastructure for corporate accountability is developing, even if development takes time.

The most important audience for these cases, however, is neither the regulators nor the accused. It is the next generation of Indian founders and corporate leaders who are right now building companies, raising funds, and making the daily decisions that accumulate into a corporate culture. For them, the cases documented here offer an education that no business school teaches directly: that the trust embedded in every investment, every bank loan, every customer advance, and every employee’s commitment is not a resource to be exploited. It is a responsibility to be honoured. And that in modern India, the consequences of mistaking one for the other have become, as several of the individuals in this survey are discovering, genuinely severe.

The personal ATM, it turns out, is connected to a very large and increasingly attentive alarm system.

All allegations, findings, and characterisations in this article are sourced from official regulatory orders (SEBI, RBI), enforcement agency press releases and filings (ED, CBI), court records, and auditor reports in the public domain. This article does not assert the criminal guilt of any individual — that determination belongs exclusively to the courts. The article is intended as journalism, not advocacy, and is written in the public interest of documenting regulatory and enforcement action on corporate governance failures in India.