Yet another Indian CFO has been accused of stealing from the very company whose finances they were supposed to be managing.
Marcellus Investment Managers’s Chief Financial Officer Pankaj Gupta has been charged with siphoning off Rs 1.18 crore from the firm, Mumbai Mirror reports. The alleged fraud unfolded over seven months from December 2024 to July 2025. Marcellus Investment Managers is a Mumbai-based asset management firm that runs PMS services under its founder and Chief Investment Officer Saurabh Mukherjea.
Marcellus’ CFO Pankaj Gupta, who joined the firm in 2022, allegedly transferred Rs. 1,18,92,909 (Rs 1.18 crore) from the company’s accounts in 32 unauthorised transactions. The money was deposited into accounts in various banks, including ICICI, IDFC, AXIS and Kotak. The complaint has been registered under Sections 316(4) and 318(4) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023, dealing with criminal breach of trust and cheating. Gupta has 16 years of experience in the finance industry, and has previously worked with IDFC Bank and ICICI Bank.
The alleged fraud came to light when the company detected suspicious financial movement at Boston House, its office in Andheri East. Gupta reportedly confessed the unauthorised payments to a company director. According to the police, he provided a notarised confession paper regarding the unauthorised payments, but then allegedly followed that up with a threat of “some good or bad to his life” regarding any ensuing action taken by the company.
Two weeks ago, it had been reported that the CFO of RummyCulture’s parent company Gameskraft Technologies, Ramesh Prabhu, had diverted Rs. 250 crore of the company’s funds to trade futures and options from his own account. He had allegedly lost the money, confessed to his crimes in an email, and had been untraceable ever since. Prabhu had created fake mutual fund investment statements to hide the money he was diverting into his own accounts.
Marcellus Investment Partners is a well-known name in Indian financial markets. Its founder and CEO Saurabh Mukherjea makes regular appearances on TV channels and YouTube with his expert analysis, and has written several books, including Coffee Can Investing and Unusual Billionaires. Marcellus runs PMS services across different investment themes, and has been criticized for underperformance relative to benchmark indices in recent years.
Marcellus Investment Managers on Friday released a statement on the incident. “We are cognizant of the aforementioned matter at hand and it is worth stating that we had detected and reported the incident, proactively, to the concerned authorities. Suffice to say that the matter is under investigation now and hence we cannot comment anything more, but we want to unequivocally reassure all stakeholders that this incident has no impact on client investments or their funds,“ the statement said.
Interestingly, Marcellus focuses heavily on due diligence of the accounts of the companies it invests in, and says that one of its USPs is picking companies with clean governance structures and financial reporting. Saurabh Mukherjea has repeatedly insinuated that most companies in India fudge their books, and said that they carefully choose to invest in companies with clean and honest promoters. But with its own CFO making off with Rs. 1.18 crore of its funds, Marcellus appears to have not managed to detect financial fraud right under its nose.