New Delhi: Narcotics Control Bureau’s (NCB) former Mumbai zonal director Sameer Wankhede allegedly owns five properties, including a residential flat in plush Bandra, and two commercial properties worth crores including a bar, initial investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has found.
According to sources in the agency, the initial investigation has revealed that Wankhede “owns assets beyond his source of income”, prompting the CBI to file a case of corruption and criminal conspiracy against Wankhede Thursday.
Wankhede, who became national news when he arrested actor Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan in an alleged drugs procurement and consumption case in 2021, was detached from the Mumbai posting and reinstated to the Department of Revenue Intelligence early 2022 once his stint with the NCB ended 31 December 2021.
“He owns five properties, some in his name and some in his family’s name in Mumbai. Among these are residential and commercial properties including a bar that is in his own name,” a source said to ThePrint. “No officer with that salary can own such expensive real estate,” the source added.
Wankhede, the source added, was getting close to Rs 1 lakh every month as salary in hand.
According to the source, Wankhede also “sought favours from private parties”, which included some of those he had been probing.
It is also alleged that he, through a third party, demanded a bribe to “settle” the Cordelia Cruise ship probe against Aryan. Aryan was arrested for alleged procurement and consumption of drugs at a “rave party”, onboard the cruise ship in 2021. He was later released on bail and subsequently given a clean chit.
“No public servant can run a parallel business like he was doing. He had started thinking he was bigger than the law. It is during the inquiry that all these things came to fore,” a senior NCB officer said. “The CBI has conducted an enquiry of their own, following which they have registered a case against him,” the officer said.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is also likely to register a case to probe the money laundering aspect in the case, the source said.
Besides Wankhede, two other NCB officers — S.P. Vishwa Vijay Singh and Ashish Ranjan — along with independent witness Kiran Gosavi, who was also present at the Cordelia raid, were named in the FIR.
According to the source, the case was registered after a detailed inquiry carried out by the vigilance unit of the NCB against the officers. A report was submitted by the unit to the central government for further action.
“A case under relevant sections of the Prevention of Corruption Act and for criminal conspiracy has been registered against the accused. We will be looking at several observations that the Vigilance department has made against the errant officers,” the source said.
Cordelia case & Wankhede
On 2 October 2021, a team led by Wankhede had carried out a raid on the Cordelia cruise at the International Cruise Terminal at Green Gate, Mumbai. The NCB claimed to have seized 13 grams of cocaine, five grams of mephedrone, 21 grams of marijuana, 22 pills of MDMA (Ecstasy), and Rs 1.33 lakh in cash from the cruise vessel, following which 14 people were arrested.
Initially, the NCB had investigated the case, but after certain alleged “irregularities” surfaced, it was transferred to a Special Investigation Team (SIT) in agency headquarters, Delhi. The SIT took over the probe on 6 November that year.
A witness on the cruise ship, Prabhakar Sail, had alleged that NCB demanded Rs 25 crore to let off Aryan.
A five-member vigilance probe team, including deputy director general Gyaneshwar Singh, then went to Mumbai to begin a departmental inquiry and collected some documents and recordings from the NCB office at Ballard Estate in south Mumbai.
Subsequently, in May 2022, the NCB gave a clean chit to Aryan, eight months after his arrest.
NCB officers had told ThePrint then that Aryan was not found in possession of any drugs and his WhatsApp chats, which were initially treated as crucial evidence, were not indicative of him being part of any international drug trafficking racket.
Wankhede started his career with a posting in the Intelligence Bureau in Andhra Pradesh in 2006, after which he was posted in Delhi.
In the past, while serving in the Customs department, he had detained actors Minissha Lamba and Anushka Sharma at the Mumbai airport, for allegedly not declaring that they were carrying gold and diamond-studded jewellery.
Within 10 days of his joining the NCB, the agency arrested actor Rhea Chakraborty and her brother Showik in September 2020, in connection with a drugs angle in the Sushant Singh Rajput death case.
The officer was again in the spotlight for busting the alleged rave party on the Goa-bound cruise-liner and arresting Aryan, among others.
He became the subject of controversy after a witness in the NCB’s alleged Aryan Khan drug bust case claimed he was made to sign a blank paper and claimed that there were talks of a payoff worth crores, with Wankhede as one of the beneficiaries.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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