Officer layered proceeds of crime to conceal fraud: ED charge sheet

The officer, Harish Singla, is accused of siphoning off ₹16.10 crore from 127 customer accounts and squandering most of the misappropriated funds

MUMBAI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED)’s money-laundering probe related to a suspended Bank of India (BOI) officer found that he had allegedly misused loopholes in the banking system and breached the trust of colleagues by dishonestly using their user IDs. The officer, Harish Singla, is accused of siphoning off ₹16.10 crore from 127 customer accounts and squandering most of the misappropriated funds.

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The ED’s and bank’s internal preliminary investigation found that the accused had closed various accounts related to term deposits, public provident funds, senior citizen savings schemes, and savings and current deposits without any authorisation and credited the amounts in them to two of his office’s accounts at the Turner Road, Bandra, branch. The funds were thereafter remitted to his personal accounts maintained with another public-sector bank. The fraud went on from May 2023 till July 2025.

The accused subsequently allegedly invested ₹12.7 crore of the misappropriated funds in the stock market, ₹8.07 crore in real money gaming apps and ₹3.94 crore in cryptocurrency, and also invested his profits from them to add a layer to the trail of funds. However, he eventually faced heavy losses and squandered most of the funds, according to the ED’s probe.

“The accused has been actively involved in concealing, layering and utilising the proceeds of crime and projecting it as untainted property,” an ED officer said, referring to the charge sheet. The special court on January 21 took cognisance of the ED charge sheet and issued a process against the accused, observing, “Considering the prosecution complaint, statements of witnesses and accused and the record of the case… there is a strong prima facie case for proceeding against the accused.”

Singla is presently in judicial custody.

The ED probe is based on a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) case of August 6, 2025, against the accused bank official. The CBI had registered its case based on a complaint from the BOI, Mumbai North Zone, accusing Singla of misconduct and criminal misappropriation of amounts lying in various deposit accounts of the bank’s customers.

The BOI learnt of the accused’s activities after the legal heir of a bank customer, who held two of the allegedly defrauded accounts, approached the bank on August 1, 2025, to enquire about the status of the two accounts. The bank’s inquiry revealed that the two accounts stood closed and the amounts therein were remitted to the bank account of the accused. The ED arrested the accused in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, in September 2025, after a chase across states.