India's federal investigating agency has registered a case against Future Retail and its founder Kishore Biyani over an alleged bank fraud involving Rs 9.04 billion, opening a criminal investigation into one of the most spectacular corporate collapses in Indian retail history.
The Central Bureau of Investigation launched the probe after the State Bank of India accused the company of conspiring to cheat the bank by misusing sanctioned loan funds, officials said on Friday, November 6, 2026.
According to the agency, searches were conducted in connection with the case and incriminating documents relevant to the investigation were recovered and seized. The investigation is ongoing to determine the full scope of the conspiracy and to identify all the parties involved, including public servants, the agency said. Biyani did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The amount at the centre of the case, Rs 904 crore, is worth about 96 million dollars at the current exchange rate of Rs 94.1550 to the dollar.
The case adds a criminal dimension to a saga that has already travelled through boardrooms, arbitration tribunals, high courts and the insolvency courts over the past six years. Future Retail was once the flagship of the Future Group and the operator of Big Bazaar, the hypermarket chain that introduced millions of Indian shoppers to organised retail.
Its fall from a business with more than 1,700 stores to a company ordered into liquidation has become a case study in how quickly debt, disruption and legal battles can destroy a retail empire.
Kishore Biyani founded the Future Group in 1987, building it up through a series of apparel retail ventures before launching Pantaloons. In 2001 he launched Big Bazaar, India's first hypermarket chain, selling food, clothing and household goods under one roof at discounted prices. The format was an instant success with middle-class shoppers, and Big Bazaar added a hundred stores within six years.
Biyani came to be known as the Retail King of India, a businessman who styled himself as India's answer to Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart in the United States. At its peak around 2019, the Future Group operated more than 1,700 grocery retail stores across five brands, Big Bazaar, Easy Day, Food Hall, Heritage Fresh and Nilgiris, and Future Retail stood at the centre of India's organised retail revolution.
The empire was built on borrowed money, and that leverage became its undoing. By the time the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, the group carried a debt mountain of around Rs 17,000 crore. When lockdowns shuttered Big Bazaar stores, cash flows dried up and the company defaulted on payments to lenders and landlords.
Sales in the April to June quarter of 2020 collapsed to Rs 1,358 crore, against Rs 5,197 crore a year earlier. With the business running out of road, Biyani agreed in August 2020 to sell virtually all of the group's retail, wholesale and logistics businesses to Reliance Retail, the retail arm of Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries, in a slump sale valued at Rs 24,713 crore. The deal would have taken over the debt and allowed lenders to recover their dues.
The rescue never completed. Amazon, which had acquired a 49 per cent stake in Future Coupons, a holding company in the Future empire, in 2019, objected to the sale. The investment carried a non-compete clause that barred Future from selling its retail assets to certain rivals, including Reliance.
Amazon took the dispute to arbitration in Singapore, and the battle moved through the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India. Meanwhile, in February 2022, Reliance made a sudden move and took physical control of more than 800 Future Retail stores in a single weekend, saying it was acting because of unpaid lease dues. Customers and employees arrived to find Big Bazaar outlets abruptly rebranded as Reliance stores.
In April 2022, most of the secured lenders of Future Retail voted against the Reliance deal, and the transaction collapsed.
Future Retail could not survive the failure of the deal. It had already defaulted on loan repayments, and the banks lost patience. The company entered the insolvency process in July 2022, and the Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal admitted it to the corporate insolvency resolution process in February 2023.
When no resolution applicant came forward with a workable plan to turn the company around, the tribunal ordered its liquidation on July 29, 2024, and appointed Sanjay Gupta as liquidator. Liquidation means the company's remaining assets are sold off in pieces and whatever money is recovered goes to the lenders. With dues of more than Rs 17,000 crore owed to financial and operational creditors, lenders faced a haircut of around 90 per cent on their claims.
The group's troubles have continued to accumulate even after liquidation. The aggregate dues of the Future Group's companies to banks are estimated at around Rs 30,000 crore. In October 2026, the Bank of India classified the Rs 575.40 crore loan account of Future Enterprises, another Biyani-promoted company, as fraud.
That account was already a non-performing asset in the lender's books, and the bank has made a full provision against it. Future Enterprises, which held the group's physical assets, manufacturing infrastructure and investments, has been under the corporate insolvency resolution process since the financial year 2022-23.
A forensic audit by the lenders and separate inquiries by the market regulator SEBI into related party transactions have examined how money moved between group companies.
The CBI case now raises the stakes further. A bank fraud case registered by the country's premier investigating agency carries the possibility of criminal prosecution, arrests and attachment of assets, and it will examine whether sanctioned loan funds were diverted or misused rather than simply lost in a failed business.
The agency has said it is looking at the full scope of the conspiracy and at the possible involvement of public servants, a phrase that suggests the investigation may extend beyond the company's promoters to bank officials who sanctioned or monitored the loans. The searches and the seizure of documents indicate that the probe has moved beyond a preliminary complaint into an active investigation.
For the banks, the case is the latest chapter in a long effort to recover money from a borrower that once symbolised India's consumption boom. The State Bank of India, the country's largest lender, led the complaint, and other lenders in the consortium, including the Bank of India, the Bank of Baroda, the Union Bank of India, Axis Bank and IDBI Bank, have their own exposures to the group.
The liquidation of Future Retail has already left them with steep losses, and the fraud classification of related accounts has forced them to set aside money against loans that may never be repaid.
For Biyani, the case marks a sharp fall for a businessman who was once celebrated as the pioneer of modern retail in India. After the collapse of his empire, he has kept a low profile, and in December 2025 he partnered with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath to launch a new venture, The Foundery.
The CBI investigation will now test whether the collapse of Future Retail was a story of a business overwhelmed by debt and a pandemic, or whether, as the State Bank of India alleges, loan funds were deliberately misused. Until the agency completes its probe and files its findings in court, the allegations remain unproven, and Biyani has not yet responded to them in public.
(Reporting based on Reuters and Fortune India.)