New Delhi: The Delhi High Court is set to hear, on February 2, the Centre’s petition against the Central Administrative Tribunal’s (CAT) order setting aside the disciplinary charges framed against former Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) zonal director Sameer Wankhede in connection with the 2021 Aryan Khan drug case.
The action against Wankhede arose from a charge memorandum issued on August 18, 2025, alleging that he sought sensitive and confidential information from the Narcotics Control Bureau’s departmental legal advisor in June 2022 in relation to the probe into the Aryan Khan drug case, despite having been formally relieved from the NCB in January 2022.
A second charge alleged that Wankhede had obtained an assurance from the legal advisor to steer the Aryan Khan drug case investigation towards a predetermined outcome for ulterior motives.
On January 19, the CAT quashed the charge memorandum, concluding that it was vitiated by grave procedural impropriety, malice in law, and abuse of process. The tribunal also held that the charges were vague and indefinite, contained bald and omnibus allegations without material particulars, and were even without a list of witnesses. It further noted that the charges constituted the very substratum of the criminal proceedings pending before the Bombay High Court in the corruption and extortion case.
Though the matter was listed before a bench of Justices Anil Kshetarpal and Amit Mahajan on Friday, it was adjourned to February 2.
In its petition before the High Court, the Centre has asserted that the tribunal’s order was erroneous and unsustainable in law, contending that the tribunal grossly exceeded its jurisdiction by interfering at the stage of issuance of the chargesheet.
“Tribunal, while quashing the Charge Memorandum, failed to appreciate that the allegations against the Respondent are grave and strike at the root of institutional integrity; in such circumstances, it was wholly unjustified to attribute malice to the petitioner in the issuance of the Charge Memorandum, particularly in the absence of any cogent material to show personal bias or extraneous considerations, and the impugned finding of mala fides is therefore perverse, speculative and unsustainable in law,” the petition stated.
Wankhede, while serving as the zonal director of the Mumbai NCB, had arrested Shah Rukh Khan’s son, Aryan Khan, in 2021. However, he later came under the scrutiny of multiple agencies, including the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate (ED), in July 2023 for allegedly demanding a ₹25 crore bribe from Shah Rukh Khan in exchange for not implicating Aryan Khan in the case.