CBI books Subhash Chandra over LICHFL’s ₹1,322-crore complaint after an NCLT plan nearly settled ₹22,006 crore of personal-guarantee claims for ₹6.5 crore

On 31 August 2026 the Central Bureau of Investigation registered a criminal case that does not flatter the man who once sold India the idea of an unstoppable media empire. The complainant is LIC Housing Finance Limited. The principal accused, in the language of the reports that followed, is Subhash Chandra — Essel Group founder, former Zee patriarch, former Rajya Sabha member. Around him the FIR, as published across multiple newsrooms, names a ring of companies and directors: Vasant Sagar Properties Private Limited and its director Pankaj Suroliya; Pan India Infrastructure / Infra Projects Private Limited; Digital Subscriber Management and Consultancy Services Private Limited and its director Amish Pandya; Spirit Infrapower and Multiventures Private Limited and its director Rajeev Dholakia; and others not yet identified.

The alleged offences are the ones Indian credit files reserve for the moment charm dies: criminal conspiracy, cheating, criminal breach of trust. The alleged wrongful loss to LICHFL is over ₹1,322 crore. The original sanctioned principal on the two facilities at the centre of the complaint is about ₹980 crore — ₹500 crore and ₹480 crore. Outstanding amounts cited from the FIR are ₹570.50 crore on the Vasant Sagar book and ₹507.25 crore on the Digital Subscriber book. One published case identifier for the CBI file is RC0742026E0007.

That is the criminal half of a fortnight that also produced something rarer than an FIR against a celebrity promoter: a five-member NCLT special bench staying, on 1 September 2026, a 25 August repayment plan under which Chandra, as personal guarantor, would have paid about ₹6.25 crore to creditors and about ₹25 lakh in process costs — call it ₹6.5 crore, or ₹6.2 crore in one account — against admitted claims of ₹22,006.57 crore. Recovery at that price is about 0.03 per cent. The haircut is about 99.97 per cent. LICHFL’s own admitted claim in that pool was the same ₹1,322 crore now echoing through the CBI complaint. Its suggested payout under the stayed plan was reported at about ₹38.09 lakh.

Two days. One federal crime file. One tribunal freeze on alienation of assets. A lender with LIC in its lineage decided that a token cheque was not a resolution. It was an evacuation.

This investigation reconstructs the public record those newspapers have already put on the table — the certificates, the facilities, the defaults, the insolvency numbers, the stay — and asks the only question the arithmetic permits. How does a personal guarantor present as a ₹59,113.21-crore man when the loan is being taken and a ₹31.79-crore man when the loan is being collected?

1. The 2018 facilities: two pipes, one signature

The complaint, as reported by The Hindu, Hindustan Times, Scroll, NDTV and Gujarat Samachar, is not vague about the plumbing.

In 2018 LICHFL granted two credit facilities on Chandra’s personal guarantees.

The first, about ₹500 crore, went to Vasant Sagar Properties Private Limited, with Pan India Infra Projects Private Limited as co-borrower. Reporting describes it as a takeover-and-top-up facility for business expansion. Chandra’s guarantee on this book is dated, in NDTV’s account, 28 March 2018.

The second, about ₹480 crore, went to Digital Subscriber Management and Consultancy Services Private Limited, with Spirit Infrapower and Multiventures Private Limited as co-borrower. Hindustan Times describes it as a rental-discounting facility under a scheme of rental securitisation. The second guarantee sits in the same year.

Together the sanctions are the ₹980 crore NDTV uses as its headline frame. Together the souring of those books is the ₹1,322-crore loss figure LICHFL carried into both the insolvency claim and the CBI complaint. The gap between sanctioned principal and “loss” is the familiar Indian afterlife of a default: interest, penal charges, the amount that keeps growing after the borrower has stopped pretending to service it. Scroll’s FIR-linked outstanding figures — ₹570.50 crore and ₹507.25 crore — already exceed the original sanctions before one reaches the full ₹1,322-crore claim.

Both accounts, every outlet agrees, defaulted. Default, in this file, is not an allegation. It is the condition that made the rest of the file possible.

2. The certificates: a Himalaya that later denied it was a hill

Credit committees do not fund nine-hundred-crore-scale facilities on nostalgia. They fund them on paper. The paper in this case is the part of the story that will not sit still.

For the first facility, Chandra submitted a net-worth certificate putting him at ₹59,113.21 crore as on 31 March 2017. NDTV adds the professional wrapper: DIM and Co, a certificate dated around 28 March 2018, a dollar figure of $6,197.62 million — the same mountain, different currency. For the second facility, a certificate dated 6 July 2018, associated in reporting with MPJ & Co, put him at ₹40,562 crore.

Those are not journalist estimates. Those are the figures the complaint says travelled with the guarantees.

Then came personal insolvency, and a different man entered the record.

In proceedings under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, Chandra stated his net worth in 2024 was ₹31.79 crore. He further stated that even in 2017–18 he did not have a net worth of more than ₹40,000 crore. He refused, the complaint says, to acknowledge the higher figures that had escorted the LICHFL money out the door.

Line the four numbers up and stop decorating them.

• Certificate A: ₹59,113.21 crore (31 March 2017)
• Certificate B: ₹40,562 crore (6 July 2018)
• Insolvency line on the same era: not more than ₹40,000 crore
• Insolvency line on 2024: ₹31.79 crore

LICHFL’s reading, quoted in substance across the coverage, is blunt. The certificates were inflated. The documents were false. The guarantor and the borrowers colluded with common criminal and dishonest intention to cheat the company. The loan proceeds were misappropriated. The CBI has been asked to examine whether the net worth was deliberately misrepresented, who prepared and used the papers, how they were vetted, and whether the ₹980 crore was used for the purpose written on the sanction.

That is the nub NDTV named, and it is not a metaphor. If the 2018 papers were true, the insolvency statement is a demolition of the guarantor’s own earlier oath. If the insolvency statement is true, the 2018 papers were a costume. There is no third figure hiding in the sofa.

3. The complaint’s other sentence: leave the country

Buried in the quoted complaint is a line that is easy to treat as colour and dangerous to treat as colour.

LICHFL told the CBI, as reproduced by The Hindu and Hindustan Times, that the accused persons had “publicly disclosed their intention to leave India and are likely to do so, unless an FIR is registered and an investigation is undertaken at the earliest to trace the proceeds of the loan and assets of the accused persons.”

That is not a finding of flight. It is the lender’s stated reason for speed. An investigative file that ignores it is incomplete; an investigative file that treats it as proven absconding is sloppy. What it does establish is the temperature of the complainant. LICHFL was not asking for a seminar. It was asking for a lock on the door before the furniture moved.

The FIR followed on the day of the complaint: 31 August 2026. The NCLT stay and the bar on alienation of assets followed on 1 September.

4. The insolvency machine that almost finished the job

The CBI case did not appear in a vacuum. It appeared because another machine — personal-guarantor insolvency under the IBC — had already brought Chandra within touching distance of a statutory blessing.

The personal insolvency did not start with LICHFL. Scroll’s account traces it to a Section 95 application by Indiabulls Housing Finance Limited, now Sammaan Capital, over a ₹170 crore loan to Vivek Infracon. The plea was admitted in 2024. Chandra, by then, was no longer a Rajya Sabha member; that term, as an Independent backed by the BJP, ran from 2016 to 2022.

By August 2026 the admitted claim value against him as personal guarantor had reached ₹22,006.57 crore. Sit with the number. Twenty-two thousand crore of claims, filed and admitted, hanging off the personal balance sheet of a man who was telling the same system he was worth ₹31.79 crore.

On 25 August 2026, NCLT member Nilesh Sharma, in Scroll’s telling, allowed a plan under which creditors would receive about ₹6.2 crore. Other reports put the commercial number at ₹6.25 crore to creditors plus ₹25 lakh for process costs, totalling about ₹6.5 crore. Gujarat Samachar’s framing is the coldest and the most useful: a ₹22,006-crore mountain settled at a 0.03 per cent recovery. LICHFL, holding ₹1,322 crore of that mountain, was looking at about ₹38.09 lakh.

If that plan had stood, the personal guarantee that opened LICHFL’s vault in 2018 would have closed in 2026 as a joke told in a tribunal corridor. The Code that was marketed as the end of promoter impunity would have notarised the impunity.

It did not stand.

Gujarat Samachar calls LICHFL’s counter a “double strike” executed inside forty-eight hours. First the CBI complaint and FIR. Then a five-member special bench — described as the first of its kind in NCLT practice, formed after a division-bench deadlock, associated in that account with Justice (retd.) Anupinder Singh Grewal — stayed the 25 August order and froze Chandra’s power to alienate assets. Chandra, the same reporting says, opposed the constitution of that bench, arguing the tribunal has no such power.

Whether the five-member bench survives appeal is a legal question. Whether a 99.97 per cent haircut on twenty-two thousand crore of admitted personal-guarantee claims deserved to be paused is not a mysterious one.

5. The named vehicles

Investigative copy that dissolves companies into “group entities” is doing the accused a favour. The public record does not dissolve them.

Vasant Sagar Properties Private Limited took the first LICHFL pipe. Its director Pankaj Suroliya is booked.
Pan India Infra Projects / Infrastructure Private Limited stood as co-borrower on that pipe.
Digital Subscriber Management and Consultancy Services Private Limited took the second pipe. Its director Amish Pandya is booked.
Spirit Infrapower and Multiventures Private Limited stood as co-borrower on the rental-discounting book. Its director Rajeev Dholakia is booked.
Subhash Chandra signed the guarantees that made the pipes look safe.

The complaint’s theory, as carried by the five publications, is not that four companies accidentally defaulted while a celebrity guarantor watched from a balcony. It is that the guarantor and the borrowers worked a common design: inflate the standing of the man, extract the money, let the accounts fail, and later disown the standing that extracted the money. Whether that theory survives a chargesheet is the CBI’s problem. The naming is already the public’s.

6. What the numbers do that adjectives cannot

Harsh language is optional. These figures are not.

A promoter who needs a public-relations officer to explain that table needs a better table.

7. The questions a real probe cannot dodge

An FIR is a beginning. It becomes journalism’s object, not journalism’s conclusion, only if the next questions are asked in public as well as in a locked room.

On the certificates. Who commissioned DIM and Co and MPJ & Co? What asset schedule sat behind ₹59,113.21 crore? Which holdings were listed, which were unlisted, which were land, which were intra-group receivables, which were valuations of media optimism? When Chandra later said he was never above ₹40,000 crore in that period, was he correcting a fiction or walking away from a fact that had become inconvenient?

On end-use. A takeover-and-top-up for expansion is a purpose. Rental securitisation is a purpose. ₹980 crore is a trail. If the money built rent-yielding assets, those assets have addresses. If it did not, the complaint’s word — misappropriation — is the correct one and should be followed into accounts, related parties, and group cashflows.

On LICHFL itself. A housing-finance company that accepts a ₹59,113-crore personal aura as load-bearing structure is not only a victim. It is an underwriter of the aura. The CBI’s reported brief includes how the papers were vetted. That brief should not be allowed to shrink until only the borrower is in the frame. Public-linked credit that fails its own checklist is part of the injury.

On the IBC plan. Who admitted ₹22,006.57 crore of claims against a man asserting a ₹31.79-crore net worth, then designed a ₹6.5-crore landing? What recovery waterfall would have given LICHFL ₹38.09 lakh and called it closure? Personal-guarantor insolvency that converts a Himalaya of claims into a courtesy payment is not a technical success. It is the old Indian default, translated into the new statute.

On the flight line. The complaint’s sentence about leaving India is either evidenced or it is heat. Investigators owe the public one of those two outcomes. Heat is not a substitute for a Look Out Circular’s paperwork.

On the special bench. Chandra’s objection that NCLT cannot form a five-member bench is a constitutional-style quarrel inside a commercial disaster. It should be decided in law. It should not be allowed to restore, by procedural fog, a 99.97 per cent erasure of admitted claims.

8. The man the file describes

Subhash Chandra is not an anonymous defaulter from a district industrial estate. He built a television kingdom that instructed the middle class on ambition. He sat in Parliament. He signed guarantees that told a housing-finance company he was among the most solvent individuals in the country. He then entered insolvency as a man of ₹31.79 crore and nearly left it having paid ₹6.5 crore toward ₹22,006 crore of admitted personal-guarantee claims.

The coverage does not record a detailed public rebuttal from Chandra or the borrower companies to the FIR itself. What it records is the earlier insolvency denial of the Himalayan net worth. That denial is not a defence so much as an exhibit. It is the exhibit LICHFL walked into CBI headquarters.

None of this is a conviction. The law still has to do the slow work: statements, forensic audit, valuation reconstruction, end-use mapping, chargesheet or closure. Chandra and every named director retain the right to show that the certificates were honest, the defaults were commercial misfortune, the IBC plan was lawful, and the complaint is a creditor’s tantrum.

What they do not retain is the right to be written about as if the numbers were gentle.

A guarantee that is worth ₹59,113 crore in a sanction note and ₹31.79 crore in a tribunal is not a misunderstanding. It is a split screen. On one side of the screen, a baron. On the other, a man asking the statute to treat twenty-two thousand crore of admitted claims as a problem that ₹6.5 crore can dissolve. LICHFL refused to watch both screens and applaud. It filed. The CBI booked. The NCLT stayed.

That is the news. The rest is the smell the news gives off when it is not sprayed with perfume: a promoter’s personal standing inflated for credit, deflated for insolvency, and almost laundered into a statutory haircut until a lender with a four-figure-crore hole decided that 0.03 per cent was not closure.

It was contempt, itemised.