HC grants bail to former RCom executive in ₹19k-cr loan default case

Former Reliance Communications (RCom) senior vice-president Vishwanath Rao granted bail in view of the fact that no specific overt acts had been attributed to him and the allegations against were generic in nature

MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court on Tuesday granted bail to former Reliance Communications (RCom) senior vice-president Vishwanath Rao in connection with a ₹19,694.33 crore loan default case, in view of the fact that no specific overt acts had been attributed to him and the allegations against were generic in nature.

HC grants bail to former RCom executive in ₹19k-cr loan default case

Rao was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in April this year.

He initially applied for bail before the special CBI court, saying he had joined RCom in December 2000 in a middle management capacity. As a senior manager, his role encompassed commercial and banking operations including preparation of budgets, MIS and cash flow reports, coordination of project related expenditure and routine execution of banking transactions.

Since Rao was neither a member of the Board of Directors nor part of the Treasury or Financial Policy hierarchy, he had no authority to independently sanction, structure or deploy funds. Moreover, he did not participate in negotiations with lenders or formulation of borrowing strategy and the signing authority exercised by him was purely procedural and arose from operational need, Rao said in his bail plea.

The special court, however, rejected Rao’s bail plea, prompting him to approach the high court, where his counsels PK Sanghrajka and Shrishankar Prajapati pointed out that the 67-year-old suffers from uncontrolled type-2 diabetes, hypertension and coronary artery disease, having undergone angioplasty in February this year.

The lawyers also pointed out that Rao was not a beneficiary of a single rupee and all the allegations levelled against him were generic in nature; only three of the 20 persons named in charge-sheet had been arrested by the CBI, Rao’s lawyers said.

Advocate Amit Munde, representing the CBI, opposed the bail plea, claiming that the material collected during investigation, including banking records, internal communications, transaction trails and witness statements prima facie indicated Rao’s active and direct involvement in carrying out layered transactions, bill discounting arrangements and routing of funds through Reliance group entities designed to facilitate diversion and round-tripping of loan funds in violation of sanction terms.

Munde noted that the company (R Com) in which Rao worked had caused financial loss of several thousand crores to Indian and foreign institutional investors through a complex web of transactions undertaken through circuitous movement of funds and urged the court to reject the bail plea.

A single judge bench of justice Milind Jadhav, however, refused “to accept the generic and fanciful submissions” after noting that no overt acts had been attributed to Rao. The court granted him bail in view of the fact that the investigation was already over and no purpose would be served by his further detention.

The Banks, Securities and Fraud branch of the CBI had registered an FIR against R Com and some of its senior executives on August 21, 2025, based on a complaint from the State Bank of India, alleging that from 2013, the group had induced the state-run bank to extend various credit facilities and eventually caused it wrongful loss of ₹2,929.05 crore. Subsequently, other members of the consortium approached the CBI and reported losses caused by RCom to them, taking the cumulative losses to ₹19,694.33 crore.