All officials of a private bank operating under a license issued by the Reserve Bank of India will be defined as public servants under the Anti-Corruption Act. Under the Act, public servants caught misusing their official powers are prosecuted.

A precedent in this area was the Supreme Court's grant of the Central Bureau of Investigation's (CBI) plea to prosecute two former officials of Global Trust Bank Ltd (which was a private bancock before its merger with state-owned Oriental Bank of Commerce (OBC)), who were accused of corruption and receiving $2 million in illicit proceeds.

CBI appealed against the Delhi and Bombay High Court verdicts quashing the indictment against Ramesh Jelly (then GBT chairman) and Sridhar Subashree (then CBI executive director). The courts' verdicts stated that the accused could not be prosecuted under the Anti-Corruption Act because they were employees of a private bank and not government officials.

The inconsistency was that Section 46A of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949, deemed bank employees to be public officers. However, this definition was used to prosecute corrupt employees only in conjunction with various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). When the provisions of the Penal Code were repealed and transferred to the Anti-Corruption Act, the relevant insertion and reference to the Banking Regulation Act was forgotten.

The Supreme Court termed the omission as "inadvertent" on the part of the legislature and said that for the purpose of anti-corruption, the definition of a public servant was being expanded to some extent and the banking industry should not forget that Section 46A of the Banking Regulation Act is not invalidated merely by the deletion of the relevant provisions from the Penal Code.