Sameer Wankhede, former Mumbai NCB zonal director has approached the Bombay High Court challenging the Enforcement Directorate’s money laundering case against him, asserting that it was a counter blast to a complaint filed by him against the anti-drug agency’s senior official.
The Enforcement Directorate registered the money laundering case against Sameer Wankhede after taking cognisance of a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) FIR in an alleged Rs 25 crore bribe demand from Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan’s family to spare his son Aryan Khan in a drugs case.
A 2008-batch Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer of the Customs and Indirect Taxes cadre, Sameer Wankhede, in his petition mentioned that the Enforcement Directorate’s case smacks of malice and vendetta. The plea lodged through advocates Karan Jain, Sneha Sanap and Aditya Targe on February 6 sought for the ED case to be quashed and an interim order to be passed granting him protection from any coercive action.
In addition, the former NCB officer also sought for the investigation being carried out by the ED to be stayed till his petition against the CBI case is heard and decided. Both his petitions namely, one against the CBI case and the other against the ED case are likely to come up for hearing on February 15 before a division bench headed by Justice P D Naik. Notably, in the CBI case, Wankhede has been granted interim protection from coercive action by the High Court last year.
In his plea against the ED case, Wankhede claimed that while the ECIR (enforcement case information report) was filed last year, summons have been issued to some NCB officers now after he registered a complaint against NCB’s Deputy Director General Gyaneshwar Singh last month before a Delhi court seeking action against him under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
He further claimed that he was constrained to approach the court in Delhi as both the Delhi and Mumbai police had failed to conduct an inquiry into the complaint letters he addressed to them against Singh.