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Journalism of Courage
On Friday (May 12), former Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh’s suspension was revoked and all charges against him were dropped by the Maharashtra government. The same day, the CBI registered a corruption against IRS officer Sameer Wankhede, who once headed the NCB Mumbai zone, for allegedly demanding a bribe of Rs 25 crore from family members of those who had been arrested in the Cordelia cruise ship “drug bust” case, including actor Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan.
Singh and Wankhede had both hit headlines in the same year, 2021, and both controversies had involved not just these two high-ranking officials but also powerful politicians and well-known personalities. Here is a look back at them.
Troubles began for Singh, who was at the time Mumbai’s top cop, in February 2021, when a vehicle with gelatine sticks was found outside Antilia — the residence of industrialist Mukesh Ambani. It led to a tussle between Singh and then Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh, who accused the police officer and his office of committing “serious errors” regarding the incident.
Within a few days of the NCP leader’s comment, the police officer wrote a letter to then Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, alleging that Deshmukh had set a monthly bribery target of Rs 100 crore from Mumbai Police. The home minister had to eventually resign due to these claims and went to jail for around a year.
In response, several cases were registered against Singh. He was first named in an FIR filed at Marine Drive police station in July 2021. It was registered on the complaint of Mira Bhayander-based businessman Sham Sundar Agarwal, who claimed that he was falsely implicated in a case by Singh and other police officers and they asked money for not arresting him.
The same month, at Kopri police station in Thane, another FIR was registered against Singh in which he was accused of exhorting money from and threatening developer Shyamsunder Agarwal and his nephew Sharad. Then, in August 2021, the officer was named along with dismissed police official Sachin Waze and two others in an FIR filed at Goregaon police station for their alleged involvement in an exhortation case related to a hotelier.
Two more cases were registered against Singh. One was based on the complaint of inspector Bhimrao Ghadge, who claimed that during his stint with Thane police, Singh, the then Thane Commissioner, asked him to drop charges against a person and extort money. The other case was pertaining to the allegation of businessman Ketan Tanna. He had claimed that Singh along with other police officers as well as gangster Ravi Pujari extorted money from him.
In April 2022, these cases were transferred to the CBI on the Supreme Court’s order. The investigation agency registered them afresh and recorded the statements of the complainants, following which they began probing the matter.
Singh was ultimately suspended in December 2021 and retired on June 30 next year. With his suspension now revoked, the former commissioner will now be treated as on duty from the day he was suspended till his retirement.
In October 2021, Wankhede led a team of Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) officials to raid the Goa-bound Cordelia cruise ship off the Mumbai coast. He claimed to have seized 13 gm of cocaine, 5 gm of mephedrone, 21 gm of marijuana, 22 pills of MDMA and Rs 1.33 lakh cash in the raid and arrested 17 people, including Aryan Khan.
In the following days, alleging that Aryan had been a regular consumer of illegal drugs, the NCB opposed his bail pleas in the court. The Bombay High Court eventually released him from jail, 26 days after the raid. Meanwhile, claims against Wankhede and his team emerged, saying that they were trying to falsely implicate Aryan. This led to the formation of an NCB Special Investigation Team (SIT) that carried out an inquiry into the alleged wrongdoings of NCB officers who had raided the Cordelia cruise.
The SIT, which dropped all the charges against Aryan in May last year, said in its internal report, “It is strange to note that in spite of clear cut denial by Arbaaz (Merchant) – Khan’s friend from whom small amount of charas was seized – regarding involvement of Aryan in procurement or possession of drugs, the Investigating Officer started looking at WhatsApp chats of Aryan without even formally seizing his mobile phone. It appears the IO was motivated to somehow implicate Aryan Khan in the drug case.”
A source told The Indian Express that although Wankhede couldn’t find any drugs on Aryan, he continued to push the investigation against him, for instance, by sending an NCB team to Shah Rukh’s bungalow ‘Mannat’ on October 21, 2021, in an ostensible “raid”.
Sources said Wankhede had sought permission to search the actor’s premises but was refused. “So he prepared summons for recovery of some documents from Mannat and sent a team inside to serve the same. The media had been informed beforehand about an impending ‘raid’. It was finally a call from Delhi that stopped the team from going inside Shah Rukh’s house,” an officer said.
CBI has now booked Wankhede, who is currently posted in the office of Director General of Taxpayers’ Services (DGTS) in Chennai, and others under the charge of corruption.
“It has also been alleged that the accused persons entered into a conspiracy in order to extort an amount of around Rs 25 crore from the family members of the alleged accused… by threatening them of the accusation of offences of possession of narcotics substances as per the alleged directions of Wankhede being the supervisory officer. A token amount of Rs 50 lakh as bribe was allegedly obtained in furtherance of this conspiracy…,” a CBI spokesperson said on Friday.
