Gurugram: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested another Haryana Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer in the Rs 645-crore IDFC FIRST Bank and AU Small Finance Bank fraud that shook the state earlier this year.
The central agency late on Monday evening arrested senior IAS officer Pankaj Aggarwal, a Haryana cadre officer of the 2000 batch who was then Principal Secretary in Department of School Education and Agriculture, in connection with the misappropriation of government funds from the account of Haryana School Shiksha Pariyojna Parishad (HSSPP) and Haryana State Agriculture Marketing Board (HSAMB) maintained with the Sector 32, Chandigarh branch of IDFC FIRST Bank.
He was to be produced before the court on Tuesday.
One of the most trusted IAS officers of the Nayab Singh Saini-led BJP government, Aggarwal was appointed the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Haryana just ahead of the 2024 Assembly elections in July 2024, a post he occupied till 23 June 2025.
Even as he occupied the post of the CEO, Haryana, he held the additional charge of Principal Secretary, Haryana School Education Department, and Chairman of Haryana School Education Board, Bhiwani.
Once relieved from the post of the CEO, Aggarwal was posted as Principal Secretary of the Agriculture Farmers’ Welfare Department.
It was during his term as Principal Secretary of the School Education and Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare Department that he allegedly was involved in the opening of accounts for the government funds in the IDFC FIRST Bank and the subsequent fraud.
In March, Aggarwal was appointed the Returning Officer for the Rajya Sabha elections, which saw a lot of drama and controversies over the votes declared invalid.
“Investigation revealed that accounts of these departments were opened in violation of extant guidelines of the Finance Department of the Government of Haryana and later funds were transferred thereto in excess of limits. These accounts were opened during the tenure of Sh. Pankaj Aggarwal, the then Principal Secretary,” a CBI spokesperson told ThePrint. “Through fraudulent transactions in the accounts of these departments, funds were misappropriated, causing a net loss of Rs 60.54 crore to the government.”
Agarwal is the second IAS officer to be arrested in the case. Ram Kumar Singh, a 2012-batch officer who served as Commissioner of Municipal Corporation Panchkula, was arrested on 19 June for his alleged role in the siphoning of Rs 79.46 crore from MC Panchkula’s IDFC FIRST Bank account. Singh has since been remanded to judicial custody after the expiry of his police remand.
While Ram Kumar Singh had entered the IAS through promotion from the Haryana Civil Services, Aggarwal was a directly recruited All India Services (AIS) officer.
The larger scam
The Rs 60.54 crore loss attributed to the two departments that Agarwal headed forms part of a larger fraud at the Sector 32 IDFC FIRST Bank branch, in which funds totalling Rs 504 crore from eight Haryana departments were siphoned off and routed to shell entities through forged or non-existent fixed deposit receipts and debit notes.
The Enforcement Directorate, which is running a parallel probe under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, has put the overall fraud figure at Rs 645 crore, while the CBI has pegged it at Rs 657 crore.
So far, the CBI has chargesheeted 17 accused in the Haryana leg of the case, six bank officials of IDFC FIRST Bank and AU Small Finance Bank, three public servants of the Haryana government, two companies, and six private persons. The chargesheet against IAS officers is yet to be filed.
Two bank officials have been identified as the principal architects of the fraud—Ribhav Rishi, former branch manager at IDFC FIRST Bank’s Sector 32 Chandigarh branch, and Abhay Kumar, relationship manager at AU Small Finance Bank.
They allegedly lured government departments with an unusually high interest rate of 10 percent per annum to park idle state funds as fixed deposits—deposits that were never actually created. The money was instead routed through shell companies to jewellers, from whom equivalent cash was collected and distributed.
The scam surfaced in February when an official in the development and panchayats department sought to close a government account and found massive discrepancies between departmental records and the actual balance.
IDFC FIRST Bank subsequently disclosed the unauthorised transactions to stock exchanges, admitted its employees had acted in collusion with outsiders, and returned Rs 578 crore, principal and interest, to the Haryana government. The state then handed the probe to the CBI.
Beyond the Haryana cases, the CBI has also taken over two related matters from Chandigarh, one pertaining to Chandigarh Smart City Limited and Municipal Corporation Chandigarh, and another involving CREST Chandigarh. One chargesheet each has been filed in both.
The agency has chargesheeted five bankers, one CSCL official, and one private person in the CSCL case, and five bankers, two CREST officials, four private persons, and two companies in the CREST case. A senior India Forest Service officer, Navneet Kumar Srivastava, has already been arrested in the CREST matter.
“The CBI remains committed to bringing all those responsible to justice and to ensuring that the trail of misappropriated public funds is fully traced,” the spokesperson said.
Who is Pankaj Aggarwal?
Hailing from Dhanbad in Jharkhand, Pankaj Aggarwal joined the IAS on 4 September 2000 in the Haryana cadre. He began with field postings as Assistant Commissioner in Karnal and Sub Divisional Officer in Jhajjar before rising through district administration as Deputy Commissioner of Kurukshetra (2007–2011) and Sonepat (2011–2013)—postings that put him at the centre of agrarian Haryana and the governance demands it places on officers.
By 2013, he was Transport Commissioner, followed by State Project Director for Prathmic Shiksha Pariyojna Parishad and Director of Elementary Education. The years from 2015 to 2022 saw him cycle through an unusual breadth of portfolios—Labour Commissioner, Director General of Food Civil Supplies, Commissioner for Administrative Reforms, Member Secretary of the Haryana Governance Reforms Authority, at times holding charge of as many as five departments simultaneously.
His most publicly visible role came in July 2024 when he was appointed Chief Electoral Officer and Commissioner and Secretary for Elections, a post of critical constitutional significance that made him the principal officer responsible for overseeing the October 2024 Haryana elections, which the BJP won for a third consecutive term.
He was transferred from that charge in June 2025 to head the Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Department, then took additional charge of School Education in December 2024 while also serving as Chairman of the Haryana Board of School Education, Bhiwani. It was during his earlier tenure as Principal Secretary, School Education, covering the Haryana School Shiksha Pariyojna Parishad, and Agriculture, with charge of HSAMB, that the CBI alleges the fraudulent accounts were opened and funds siphoned.
After his name surfaced in the scam, the Haryana government moved him out of Irrigation and Water Resources to the Architecture Department, where he remained posted until his arrest.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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