Gurugram: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has accused IAS officer Saket Kumar of trying to bury a fraud in the Haryana Panchayat department’s bank accounts by moving to close the two accounts when the scam was about to be exposed.
In a supplementary charge sheet filed on 2 September, the agency alleged that Saket Kumar, a 2005-batch IAS officer, knew about the fraud in the last week of December 2025. He was then commissioner and secretary of the Development and Panchayats Department.
The CBI says he did not report the fraud, but moved to close the two accounts from where the money had been siphoned off, so that the bankers would have to make the balance good and nothing would have to be disclosed.
“He was therefore not moving to protect the public money by reporting the fraud. He was moving to have the fraud concealed quietly and from within, so that the accounts could be squared, closed and forgotten, and nothing would ever require to be disclosed,” says the chargesheet.
The chargesheet, which ThePrint reviewed, says Rs 25 crore from a pension fund of the power utility that Saket Kumar headed was routed into the panchayat accounts.
Saket Kumar also held additional charge as additional principal secretary to the chief minister, as commissioner and secretary of the co-operation department, and as the MD of the Haryana Power Generation Corporation Limited (HPGCL).
The CBI holds him responsible for directing the closure of the accounts that made such a step necessary, rather than ordering the transfer of the amount himself. The chargesheet says that in February, when the scam could no longer be hidden, Kumar came forward as the man who had raised the alarm.
“It is a step taken to place himself on the right side of a record which he had spent the preceding two months in trying to alter,” the chargesheet says of that complaint.
The case concerns the alleged diversion of public funds of eight Haryana government bodies through accounts in IDFC First Bank and AU Small Finance Bank. Six IAS officers are among those named in the chargesheets, and the CBI has detailed each IAS officer’s role.
Saket Kumar told ThePrint he could not comment as the matter was sub judice. “The matter is sub judice, and I would not like to comment on this matter at this point of time.”
A single word on a file
The story, as the CBI tells it, begins with one word. In September 2025, the Department of Housing for All was about to send Rs 197.87 crore to the panchayat department under the Mukhya Mantri Gramin Awas Yojana (MMGAY) 2.0.
The scheme provides residential plots to eligible rural families. The money was meant for land compensation to gram panchayats and for development work in the new colonies.
On 10 September 2025, clerk Ashish put up a note on a file. The department would need a bank account to receive the money. He proposed one dedicated account. The note travelled up the chain. It reached the then Director General, D.K. Behera, who wrote on 16 September that “as per telephonic discussion with C&SDP”, the land compensation amount should go to a single bank, preferably Axis Bank.
C&SDP stands for Commissioner and Secretary, Development and Panchayat. That was Saket Kumar.
The infrastructure development fund, Behera wrote, should go to IDFC First Bank and AU Small Finance Bank.
The file went to Kumar. On 18 September, he wrote one word on it: “Seen”.
The chargesheet says that word was treated as approval, and on the strength of it three accounts were opened. Two of them were with IDFC First Bank and AU Small Finance Bank.
The CBI said that the note from below asked only one question: in which bank should the account be opened? By writing “Seen”, it says, Kumar showed the matter “was already decided”.
Behera has told investigators he was competent to open the account in a suitable bank. But since Kumar had asked for these banks, he said, the file was processed accordingly. In the CBI’s telling of Behera’s statement, the “final authority” had made his wish known, so there was no scope to change it.
Rules CBI says were skipped
The CBI says the choice of banks was not Kumar’s to make. Under the finance department guidelines of 13 March 2018, the file should have gone to the finance department for advice and approval. Under the guidelines of 12 July 2024, banks had to be asked to quote their interest rates before any one was chosen.
Neither happened. The chargesheet says no quotation was invited from any bank. No prior approval was taken from the finance department, and no approval after the fact either.
A file that was alleged to have been sent to the finance department for post facto approval was, in the CBI’s words, “never sent”. The department’s own practice was different, too. It already ran separate accounts for other schemes with IndusInd Bank, HDFC Bank and Canara Bank.
Where a scheme had more than one component, it opened one nodal account with child accounts under it. The MMGAY 2.0 had two components.
The CBI says there was no reason to open three accounts in three banks. It says the “connivance was therefore evident from the very inception of the idea”.
How bankers ‘reached’ accused
The chargesheet says the file did not reach Kumar the usual way, because the Directorate below him never referred the matter to him.
The CBI says Ribhav Rishi, the banker who is accused number one in the case, and his co-accused learnt through their sources that deposits were coming.
According to the chargesheet, they reached Kumar through middleman Naresh Kumar, a Superintendent in the RTI wing of the Panchayat department. Naresh Kumar had no official connection with the scheme.
“Saket Kumar, of his own volition and not on any reference from below, called D.K. Behera and influenced him to get the accounts opened,” says the chargesheet.
A statement by Manoj Kaushal, a Deputy Director in the department, is cited in support.
According to the chargesheet, after the ‘Seen’ remark of 18 September, Abhay Kumar of IDFC First Bank and some other bank officials came to the panchayat office. They met Kaushal, saying they had come “through reference of Saket Kumar” to collect the documents for opening the account. They asked for the home address of Behera, the authorised signatory, so they could get the form signed.
The CBI says Ribhav Rishi and Shamim Dar, another banker, also came on Kumar’s reference. Abhay Kumar had already left IDFC First Bank on 10 June 2025, three months before the visit.
According to the CBI, Kaushal told Kumar that the permitted deposit limits of the two banks were Rs 50 crore for IDFC First Bank and Rs 25 crore for AU Small Finance Bank. The chargesheet says Rs 112 crore had been contemplated for the two accounts.
The CBI says: “Saket Kumar scolded him.”
On 3 October 2025, Rs 75 crore was moved from the Axis Bank account into the two banks: Rs 50 crore went to IDFC First Bank and Rs 25 crore to AU Small Finance Bank.
The chargesheet says that no development work under the scheme had been approved by then and no payment was due.
How money went
The draining began within days. The AU Small Finance Bank account saw its first debit of Rs 10 crore on 6 October. The IDFC First Bank account was operated from 9 October.
The CBI says the accounts were rigged so the department would not know. The mobile number registered with both banks was that of Prince Sharma, a Superintendent in the Directorate who had nothing to do with the scheme.
Every alert on every debit went to that number, not to Behera. The email ID given to AU Small Finance Bank differed from the department’s real ID by a single letter.
When the department asked for statements, the CBI says, forged ones were supplied. One AU Small Finance Bank balance certificate showed Rs 25.26 crore as on 15 December, though the account had already been emptied.
The agency alleges that money was withdrawn using cheques with no corresponding debit notes, or debit notes with no cheques. One cheque, numbered 000011, carried Rs 2,50,00,000 in figures and ‘Twenty Five Crores’ in words. It was honoured on 4 November, according to the chargesheet.
The CBI says the money mostly went to Swastik Desh Projects, which it described as a shell entity.
The chargesheet puts the fraudulent debits from the IDFC First Bank account at Rs 89,23,69,652 across 16 transactions. From the AU Small Finance Bank account, it pegs the account at Rs 71,61,14,910 through 14 debits.
Only Rs 1,27,44,689 came back, from IDFC First Bank on 29 January 2026. About Rs 49 crore, the CBI says, remains unaccounted for.
What CBI says happened in Dec
The chargesheet says the trail also runs into a second department headed by Kumar.
On 29 December, Rs 25 crore was withdrawn from the HPGCL Employees’ Pension Fund account at AU Small Finance Bank through Cheque No. 000021. The money went to Swastik Desh Projects, according to the chargesheet.
On 15 January 2026, about Rs 25.33 crore was transferred from Swastik Desh Projects into the MMGAY 2.0 account of the panchayat department.
Kumar was the managing director of HPGCL from 18 June 2025 to 10 April 2026. The chargesheet says Kumar approved a proposal on 9 January 2026 to close the AU Small Finance Bank account and shift Rs 25 crore to IDFC First Bank.
But by then, there was “in fact, no money left in that account to transfer”, the chargesheet says. Rishi was, therefore, directed to arrange Rs 25 crore.
The CBI says that the pension fund money, routed through Swastik Desh Projects, was returned to the account so that it could be closed. On 10 December 2025, the department sent the new Director General Anish Yadav’s specimen signatures to all three banks.
The letter reached IDFC First Bank on 12 December. The bank kept processing transactions on the signature of Behera, who had by then been transferred out of the department.
By the end of December, the chargesheet says, “the fraud in the accounts of Director Panchayat MMGAY 2.0 was on the point of coming to light” because the panchayat department’s transactions were directly linked to other departments.
“Steps were thus taken to clean up the mess,” it says.
The CBI notes that Kumar held charge of HPGCL during this very period. It also says the step “did not prove sufficient to douse the fire”, because another account, at IDFC First Bank, had seen similar transactions.
On 13 January, Yadav recorded on the file that “as per telephonic discussion with C&SDP, the matter/proposal stands approved”.
The same day a proposal was moved to close both accounts and shift the funds to Axis Bank, in the name of “orders of higher authorities”. The CBI says Kumar approved it.
The AU Small Finance Bank account was closed on 15 and 16 January and Rs 25.45 crore was moved to the department’s Axis Bank account.
“The device is a transparent one. A direction to close an account leaves the banker with no choice at all, because an account cannot be closed unless the balance in it is made good,” says the chargesheet.
It adds that had the bankers been able to arrange the funds, “the whole of the fraud in this department would have been buried at that point”.
The voice note
The CBI leans on a recorded conversation between Naresh Kumar and Ribhav Rishi. It was recovered from the phone of Ankur Sharma, the director of a company the CBI names among the accused.
Naresh Kumar is heard telling Rishi: “Saket Sir se pese wala phone na krana kahi unko ye lage ki mere reference se bula rhe h.” Roughly, he tells Rishi not to have anyone call ‘Saket Sir’ about the money, in case he thinks Naresh is calling them on his own reference.
Naresh Kumar also says: “Khud boss ne kah tha yaar Naresh us din jo phela day tha na first day, ki raita na felne do, isko niptao, ye raita faila dega (The boss himself said, “Look, Naresh—remember that first day? He said, ‘Don’t let things get out of hand; wrap this up, or else he’s going to make a huge mess of things.‘”
“Raita phailana” is Hindi slang for making a mess. The CBI reads the words as an instruction to contain and suppress the fraud, not to report it.
In another line, Rishi says “Saket Sir” had told Yadav to take action if it was not done.
The CBI says the conversation shows Kumar knew Rishi and knew about Rishi’s earlier visit to his home. It says the people involved were treating access to him “as available”.
The complaint
The CBI does not accept the complaint Kumar later made as proof of good faith. The chargesheet says he relies on it as proof of good faith, and adds: “In truth it proves the opposite.”
It says his knowledge is “fixed, at the latest, in the last week of December 2025, when he was closing the account”. The charge bsheet lists three dates on which, it says, he dealt with these very accounts and did not report: 9 January, 13 January, and 28 January 2026.
“The duty of a public servant to report an irregularity touching public money arises the moment he comes to know of it,” the chargesheet says. It says he “came forward only in February 2026, when the exposure had become a certainty”.
The department wrote to IDFC First Bank on 9 February that it had never issued any fund transfer instruction.
A three-member committee was set up on 11 February and gave its report on 18 February. That same day, the department asked AU Small Finance Bank to freeze the Swastik Desh Projects account.
The CBI also says Kumar was a member of a WhatsApp group called ‘Sukoon Group’, along with officials of IDFC First Bank. It says his presence there shows his “proximity to the accused bank officials independent of any single transaction”.
The charges
The CBI names Kumar as accused number 23. It says he was “a party to the agreement” and that his conduct “discloses his involvement”.
It points to his “direct involvement into a matter which lay with the powers of Director General”, in favour of two named banks, “upon an oral direction which he took care not to reduce to writing”.
The chargesheet invokes sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita on criminal conspiracy, criminal breach of trust, cheating, forgery and destruction of documents required as evidence. It also invokes sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act, including 13(1)(a) on criminal misconduct.
Unlike in the cases of some other officers, where the CBI has ascribed a monetary or material benefit to them, the chargesheet does not say what Saket Kumar received in return.
The CBI registered its FIR on 8 April. The chargesheet lists Kumar as not arrested. He is now the Commissioner and Secretary, Archives Department. Prince Sharma, the Superintendent whose number the banks used for alerts, is in judicial custody.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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