Dramatic Arrest on Retirement Day
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) made a major move by arresting senior IAS officer Pardeep Kumar on the very day of his retirement. Kumar, who served as the Member Secretary of the Haryana State Pollution Control Board (HSPCB), had been evading the law enforcement agency for over a week. He went into hiding and even filed an anticipatory bail plea in a special CBI court to avoid arrest. However, the central agency tracked down his precise location and took him into custody just hours before his official superannuation, preventing a smooth retirement walkout.
The Mechanism of the Fraud
The investigation revealed a deep-rooted institutional conspiracy directly linking the bureaucrat to the embezzlement of public funds. While heading the HSPCB, Pardeep Kumar personally handled the investment portfolios and surplus funds of the department. The CBI alleged that he overstepped administrative boundaries by shifting massive amounts of government money into the Sector-32 branch of IDFC First Bank in Chandigarh, far beyond the authorized limits for creating fixed deposits.
The critical turning point of the scam lies in how the bank accounts were operated. According to investigators, a dedicated bank account was secretly opened at the branch without any official approval or departmental sanction. Surprisingly, the pollution board has no official files or records documenting the opening of this specific account. Massive cash reserves were transferred into this unauthorized account under the pretext of securing stable fixed deposits.
No Fixed Deposits Ever Existed
The central agency confirmed that despite hundreds of crores being funneled into the branch, not a single fixed deposit was ever generated by the bank. Instead, the conspirators utilized the unmonitored account to execute a sequence of fraudulent debit transactions. The money was systematically siphoned off through a complex web of fake entities and shell companies. This deliberate diversion caused a massive net loss of approximately ₹169 crore to the state exchequer, making it the single largest financial hit absorbed by any single department within this banking scandal.
Part of a Larger ₹504 Crore Corporate Syndicate
The HSPCB case is not an isolated incident of corruption. It is a critical piece of a massive ₹504 crore financial scam spanning across eight different departments of the Haryana government. Public funds from multiple civic bodies and state marketing boards were targeted using identical operational methods involving forged documentation, fictitious debit entries, and fake investment notes.
The CBI has cast a wide net to dismantle the entire network, bringing the total number of arrests in the overarching scandal to 22. Just a day prior to Kumar’s arrest, the agency apprehended two prominent banking executives—Mohammad Shamim Dhar (former team head at IDFC First Bank’s Government Business Group) and Charanjeet Singh Randhawa (former branch manager of AU Small Finance Bank). These banking professionals allegedly manipulated internal verification systems and used their authority to bypass standard banking protocols, facilitating illegal account activations to route the stolen public funds.
Expanding the Bureaucratic Crackdown
With Pardeep Kumar’s detention, the number of top-tier IAS officers arrested in connection with this inter-state banking fraud has risen to three. The agency had previously arrested senior bureaucrats Ram Kumar Singh and Pankaj Agarwal for parallel fund leakages within their respective departments. The CBI has already submitted formal chargesheets against 17 accused individuals, which includes a mix of six influential private bankers, state public servants, and third-party corporate entities. Investigators have stated that custodial interrogations are currently active to map the exact digital trails of the stolen money and recover the remaining state assets.
