Big relief to IRS officer Sameer Wankhede in this case...?
In a relief to indian Revenue service (IRS) officer and former mumbai zonal director of NCB sameer Wankhede, the delhi high court ordered that the evidence recorded by the SET should not be relied upon in any departmental inquiry against him. In any departmental investigation that may be conducted against him. After this order of the court, sameer Wankhede's claim gets strengthened where he has been calling the allegations baseless and wrong since day one.
What did the court say?
SET is an internal vigilance probe set up by the NCB under its then Deputy director General (Northern Region) Dnyaneshwar Singh to probe alleged misconduct by the sameer Wankhede-led team probing the october 2021 Cordelia cruise drug bust case. It was alleged that actor Shahrukh Khan's son aryan Khan was allegedly implicated in the Cordelia drugs case and rules were violated in the case.
IRS officer sameer Wankhede had earlier moved the high court challenging the august 21, 2023 order of the principal bench of the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) in Delhi. Acting on the petition of sameer Wankhede, the high court, a division bench of Justices rekha Palli and Shalinder Kaur on tuesday clarified that the findings of the preliminary inquiry cannot be used to convict an employee in a departmental inquiry. The high court further said that CAT had already clarified this aspect in its august 2023 order.
The relevant paragraph mentioned in the high court order stated that Dnyaneshwar Singh, being actively involved in the investigation of the Cordelia drug bust case, should not have been part of the SET, which was constituted for the alleged procedural investigation. The government accepted the CAT's conclusion that Dnyaneshwar Singh should not have been the chairman of SET even though he himself was monitoring the aryan Khan case.