₹4.30 crore seized, ₹645 crore gone: the ED’s “substantial recovery” in the Haryana IDFC bank fraud.

The raid came for the washermen, not the tap. On 29 September 2026, the Enforcement Directorate’s Chandigarh Zonal Office-II searched 14 premises across Chandigarh, Mohali and Panchkula and, two days later, put out a press note that reads like a victory. It is not one. It is a receipt for how little of a public-money fraud has actually been pinned down, seven months after the hole in the books was first noticed.

The note, dated 2 October 2026, says the searches were into the alleged embezzlement of ₹645 crore belonging to the Government of Haryana, the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation and other government accounts. What the raids actually took away was ₹4.30 crore in cash and about ₹22 crore frozen in jewellers’ bank accounts. Put those two numbers next to each other and do not blink. Against a hole the agency itself calls ₹645 crore, this round recovered and froze roughly ₹26.3 crore. That is about 4 per cent. The press release calls it a “substantial recovery”. The arithmetic calls it something else.

A fraud with four price tags

Start with the figure, because the figure will not sit still.

The case broke in February 2026, when an official of the Development and Panchayat Department tried to close an account and found the departmental books and the bank balance did not match. The accounts sat with IDFC First Bank and AU Small Finance Bank. Haryana’s Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau registered the FIR. Early official talk put the Development and Panchayat slice, under the Mukhya Mantri Grameen Awas Yojna 2.0, at ₹556 crore of principal plus ₹22 crore of interest, ₹578 crore. Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini told the Vidhan Sabha the banks had credited that sum back within 24 hours.

By May, the ED was telling the special PMLA court a different number. The fraud was not ₹570.82 crore. It was ₹645.59 crore. The extra was not a rounding error. It pulled in Chandigarh Municipal Corporation, Chandigarh Smart City Ltd, CREST, and even two private schools in Panchkula, DC Model Senior Secondary School and DC Montessori School. In September the CBI, filing its third chargesheet, priced the Haryana government case at ₹504 crore. Other reports put the combined Haryana-plus-Chandigarh loss near ₹657 crore. The Print’s reading of the chargesheet papers spoke of “over ₹400 crore”.

So the same scandal is, depending on who is holding the microphone, ₹504 crore, ₹570 crore, ₹578 crore, ₹645 crore, ₹645.59 crore or ₹657 crore. A fraud that cannot agree with itself on its own size is not a solved fraud. It is a fraud still being measured while the measuring men congratulate themselves.

IDFC First Bank has said it repaid ₹557 crore to the Haryana departments concerned while the investigation was still on. That repayment matters, and it should be said plainly. It does not wash the offence. A bank making good a hole punched by its own branch staff, using what is ultimately shareholder and depositor strength, is not the same thing as the money never having left. The alleged diversion still happened. The alleged forged instruments still cleared. The alleged cash still moved. Restitution is a balance-sheet repair. It is not an acquittal.

The method was not clever. It was brazen.

The predicate fact, as the February FIR and the later chargesheets describe it, is ugly in its simplicity. Government departments were nudged to park public money in specific branches of two private banks. Fixed deposits that were supposed to exist were, the ED has told court, never created. The money went instead to shell firms.

The ED’s May account of the pipes is specific. Capco Fintech, floated in October 2023, received ₹471.69 crore. Swastik Desh Projects received ₹203.50 crore. RS Traders received ₹87.60 crore. SRR Planning Gurus, incorporated in July 2024, received ₹55.33 crore. Personal receipts attributed to Ribhav Rishi and associates from the shells were put at ₹34.22 crore, and receipts linked to Abhay Kumar and family at ₹11.22 crore. Rishi was the branch manager at IDFC First Bank’s Sector 32, Chandigarh branch. The CBI calls him the principal architect. The ED calls him the mastermind. His employment at the bank, on the ED’s telling, ran from 21 April 2023 to 5 August 2025. The scheme, if the agencies are right, was not a one-night theft. It was a two-year installation.

The entities bled into were not obscure. On the ED’s May break-up they included the Haryana State Pollution Control Board (₹169.27 crore), Panchkula Municipal Corporation (₹80 crore), Chandigarh Municipal Corporation (₹73.50 crore), CREST (₹82.02 crore), Haryana School Shiksha Pariyojna Parishad (₹53.86 crore), the Labour Welfare Board (₹50 crore), HPGCL (₹50 crore), the Haryana Grameen Vikas Nidhi Administration Board (₹48.72 crore), Kalka Municipal Council (₹18.10 crore), Chandigarh Smart City (₹16.23 crore into RS Traders), the marketing board (₹10 crore), and the HPGCL Employees Pension Fund Trust (₹9.93 crore into Swastik Desh). Pension money. Pollution-board money. School-education money. Labour-welfare money. Housing money. A branch manager does not get to treat those as a private overdraft. Somebody in every one of those offices signed, transferred, or looked away.

Then there is the paper. The Indian Express reported a cheque on which the figures read ₹2.5 crore and the words read “Rupees Twenty Five”, and ₹25 crore still left the Development and Panchayat account. More than ₹46 crore moved from IDFC to AU on cheques and debit notes the department’s own scheme-in-charge said the department did not use. Nearly ₹50 crore is alleged to have been pulled on forged signatures of IAS officer Dusmanta Kumar Bahera after he relinquished charge as director general of the department on 28 October 2025. A bank that clears a cheque whose words and figures do not match is not a victim of a master criminal. It is a bank that stopped doing the one job a bank is for.

The jewellers were the laundry, and the laundry kept the books

Which brings us to Tuesday’s raids, and to why they are both necessary and late.

The 2 October press release says Malik Jewellers received ₹58 crore, the KLG Group (KLG Jewels, KLG Infra and KLG & Co.) ₹26 crore, M.B. Gold Traders ₹5 crore, Sham Jewellers ₹3.66 crore and Sunder Jewellers ₹3.15 crore, from intermediate shells “purportedly floated” by Rishi. The Tribune added those up: ₹95.81 crore. Gourav Kansal is named as the middleman who routed and layered the proceeds. The ED’s case is that the credits were dressed as trade, so stolen public money could re-enter the world as jewellery turnover, and that a portion of what the jewellers laundered reached accused IAS officers and other government servants.

Ninety-five crore through five jewellery names is not a rounding entry. It is a business model. Gold is the oldest washing machine in this country precisely because a sale can be invented, a bar can be melted, and cash can walk out the back while the ledger shows a customer. If the ED is right, these firms did not stumble into ₹95.81 crore of shell-company credits. They booked them. The raid found ₹4.30 crore in cash and froze ₹22 crore. The other ₹70-odd crore attributed to them in this channel is, for now, a story about where it went, not a story about what was seized. “Further investigation is under progress” is the sentence agencies write when the cupboard is not yet empty and the case is not yet proved.

Six IAS officers, a chargesheet, and a party bill

The CBI’s third chargesheet, filed on 2 September 2026 before the special judge in Panchkula, names 19 people: six Haryana-cadre IAS officers, three IDFC First Bank officers, one AU Small Finance Bank officer, and nine other Haryana government officials. The officers are Vineet Garg, Pankaj Agarwal, Mohd Shayin, Dr Saket Kumar, Pardeep Kumar and Ram Kumar Singh. The offences invoked include criminal conspiracy, cheating, destruction of evidence, forgery, falsification of accounts and criminal breach of trust under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, and bribery and criminal misconduct under the Prevention of Corruption Act. With earlier chargesheets, the CBI has now named 37 accused. Twenty-six have been arrested, on the Indian Express’s count.

Of the six, Pankaj Agarwal, Pardeep Kumar and Ram Kumar Singh have been arrested and were in judicial custody when the chargesheet was filed. Pardeep Kumar was arrested in June on the day he was due to retire. The other three have been chargesheeted without arrest. Chargesheeting is not conviction. It is also not a clerical error. It is a central agency telling a court it has enough to prosecute serving and retired members of the IAS for helping to move departmental funds into the branches where the alleged theft was run.

What the chargesheet is reported to contain, and what has not been tested at trial, is the part that should make a finance secretary lose sleep. The Indian Express, citing the chargesheet, reported that two 50-gram gold coins were collected from Sawan Jewellers in Sector 35 and delivered to a government bungalow in Sector 7A around 16 October 2025, and that Ribhav Rishi handed the packet to Vineet Garg. Call-data records of the carrier, Rishi, Garg and another accused are cited as corroboration. Hotel, restaurant and party bills running to tens of thousands of rupees are alleged to have been picked up for another officer. The Print reported a hawala delivery of ₹2 crore to Prashant, son of Ram Kumar Singh, then Commissioner of the Panchkula municipal corporation, identified by the serial number of a ₹10 note, with signed receipts from Delhi cash handlers. The same paper reported allegations of parties, escorts and mujras. These are chargesheet allegations, attributed to documents, chats and witnesses. They are not findings. They are also not the sort of allegation a service gets to shrug off as atmosphere.

Set the alleged price next to the alleged favour and the squalor is the point. Pollution-board funds, power-utility funds, a pension trust, a housing scheme: parked, on the CBI’s case, where a branch manager wanted them parked. The alleged consideration, where the chargesheet specifies it, is gold coins, a hotel bill, a cash drop coded to a ten-rupee note. If that is the rate at which public money was being steered, the insult is not only the theft. It is the discount.

What has actually been taken back

The scoreboard, using only the agencies’ own numbers, is an embarrassment dressed as progress.

The ED says it has arrested four people in the money-laundering case, attached or frozen movable and immovable assets of about ₹211 crore, and filed a prosecution complaint against 14 accused before the PMLA court in Panchkula. Add this week’s ₹4.30 crore cash and ₹22 crore freeze and the enforcement haul is still in the neighbourhood of ₹237 crore, against an ED case figure of ₹645.59 crore. The bank’s claimed repayment of ₹557 crore sits in a different column. It is the institution making the customer whole. It is not proceeds of crime traced, proved and confiscated.

An accounts officer who had been summoned by the CBI died after jumping from the eighth floor of the Haryana Civil Secretariat. That death is not a footnote. It is a measure of how this file has already burned through people while the files themselves are still being counted.

The questions the press note will not ask

A branch manager does not divert hundreds of crores out of government accounts for two years because he is charming. He does it because the accounts were opened where he worked, because instruments cleared, because counterparties accepted the money, and because the departments that owned the money did not notice until someone tried to close an account. The audit that should have screamed was silent. The internal control that should have rejected a cheque with “twenty five” in words and crores in figures was asleep. The officers who decided which bank held pollution cess, pension money and housing funds are now, several of them, accused of being paid for the decision. The jewellers who, on the ED’s case, booked ₹95.81 crore from shells are being searched in the eighth month, not the first.

None of this is a conviction. Courts in Panchkula will decide what the chats, the receipts, the gold packet and the shell ledgers actually prove. Until then every name in this piece is an accused, not a convict, and the agencies have been wrong before. But the defence available to the system is thin. The numbers are the agencies’ numbers. The chargesheet is the CBI’s chargesheet. The press release is the ED’s press release. Read together, they describe a state that handed a private branch the keys to pension funds and housing money, noticed only when the account was being shut, let the bank write a cheque to cover the hole, and is now photographing ₹4.30 crore in cash as if the photograph were the money.

It is not. The money was public. A large part of it has been put back by the bank that lost it. The people who are alleged to have taken it, steered it, washed it and spent it are still, mostly, a case. That is the fact the 2 October press release works hardest not to say.