The Delhi High Court has granted relief to Sameer Wankhede, an Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer and former Mumbai zonal director of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB). It has been directed that any departmental inquiry that may be conducted against Wankhede cannot rely on the evidence gathered by the Special Enquiry Team (SET). Under its then-deputy director-general (northern region), Gyaneshwar Singh, the NCB established the SET, an internal vigilance investigation, to look into claims of wrongdoing by the Wankhede-led team investigating the October 2021 Cordelia cruise drug bust case, in which Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan was purportedly involved.
Wankhede had already petitioned the high court to challenge an August 21, 2023, ruling from the Delhi principal bench of the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) that upheld the SET’s conclusions. He then submitted to the high court, stating that, rather than pursuing the writ suit, he would be content if the court made it clear that the results of the SET would not be utilised in the departmental investigation that was supposed to be conducted against him. In response to Wankhede’s appeal, the division bench of Justices Shalinder Kaur and Rekha Palli stated on Tuesday that an employee cannot be charged with a crime in a departmental inquiry based solely on the results of a preliminary inquiry.
The high court went on to say that in its August 2023 ruling, CAT had already made this point clear. According to the relevant paragraph cited in the high court’s order, Singh should not have been a member of the SET because he was actively investigating the Cordelia drug bust case. The SET was established to investigate potential procedural errors made by officials during the seizure and subsequent actions related to the case.
The CAT order further stated, “We think that the interest of justice would be subserved by directing the respondents numbers 1 to 5 to grant a personal hearing to the applicant before initiating any action against him based on the impugned SET report, and the decision so taken shall be communicated to him by passing a reasoned and speaking order,” while acknowledging the respondents’ arguments that the contested SET report was preliminary and that the respondents had to make an independent decision regarding the action against Wankhede. Gyaneshwar Singh, the Finance Ministry, the NCB, the MHA, and the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs were the five respondents named in the CAT order.
Thus, the high court dismissed his writ petition as “not pressed” and made it clear in its ruling that the “evidence recorded in SET will not be relied upon in the departmental enquiry which may be held against the petitioner (Wankhede) as per law.”
In response to the TNG Times’s inquiry over the high court order, Wankhede stated, “Satyamev Jayate (Truth Always Prevails)” I have immense trust in the Indian legal system.”
“The government accepted the CAT finding that Gyaneshwar Singh should not have been the SET chairman when he was supervising the Cordelia case,” a Wankhede legal assistant told TNG Times when reached. The Supreme Court approved of the same. Most significantly, the court ruled that Gyaneshwar Singh’s SET and the evidence they gathered could not be utilised against Wankhede, invalidating Singh’s leadership of the SET.
In support of his May 2023 request to have the CBI’s May 2023 FIR filed against him and others over alleged irregularities related to the Cordelia case probe quashed, Wankhede filed a petition with the Bombay High Court in September of last year, citing the August 21 CAT order. Wankhede asserted that the SET report, which served as the foundation for the entire CBI FIR, including the sanction, was invalid because its author was ineligible to sit as a judge in his case. Wankhede was given temporary protection from the CBI’s coercive action on May 19 of last year by the high court. This protection was later extended when he agreed to help with the investigation and appear before the agency’s investigating officer.
Based on a complaint from the NCB that included the SET’s findings, the CBI filed an FIR on May 11 of last year, accusing Wankhede and a few other people, including the NCB officials, of plotting to extort ₹25 crores from Shah Rukh Khan in return for not naming his son Aryan in the drug bust case. The NCB detained Aryan Khan on October 3, 2021, in connection with the reported cocaine bust on the Cordelia cruise ship off the coast of Mumbai. Three weeks later, the Bombay High Court granted Aryan bail since the agency was unable to prove its claims against him. Neither was he tested for drug consumption, nor were any narcotics seized.
Following some accusations made against Wankhede and the probe team about the way the case search and investigation had been handled, the NCB established the SET. Before the CAT, Wankhede had contested the SET’s conclusions and report from June 2022 to November 2022. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), as the appropriate authority, received the preliminary report from the SET and the NCB.