Telangana High Court dismisses Fino Payment Bank's Rishi Gupta’s plea; Here's what the HC said
The Telangana High Court dismissed a writ petition filed by Fino Payments Bank managing director and chief executive officer Rishi Nand Kishore Gupta on Monday. The plea challenged his arrest in a case allegedly involving online betting. Gupta sought to be released on bail.
The petitioner has been arrested on the grounds that he has not cooperated with the investigation. He has masterminded the transactions with shell entities, thereby defrauding the Goods and Services Tax
Since he was not cooperating with the investigation, and the evidence gathered during the investigation showed the involvement of the petitioner in an organised syndicate in operating illegal online gaming websites with the assistance of associated fintech companies, a decision was taken to arrest him on 27.02.2026.
It is further submitted that, as per the data collected by the DGGI, transactions of about Rs.10,000 crore are conducted without proper invoices.
If the rate of tax on such transactions is computed, the amount of tax evasion discovered would come to about Rs.2,800 crore.
An amount of approximately Rs.3,000 crore is involved. The tax involved is approximately Rs.840 crore. Therefore, the offence was committed by the petitioner under Sections 132(1)(a) and 132(1)(i) of the CGST/SGST Act, 2017, which are cognisable and non-bailable offences.
Three programme managers/resellers with whom the company was associated were found to be non-functioning and dummy during the process of investigation. It alleges that the company, with the assistance of these programme managers/resellers, opened bank accounts of a large number of shell entities for the movement of money from online gaming without payment of appropriate GST.
