NCB corruption case: Sam D’Souza moves sessions court for pre-arrest bail
Sanville D'Souza, a business consultant accused of "brokering a deal" to aid Shah Rukh Khan's son Aryan in the drugs-on-cruise case, filed an anticipatory bail plea. D'Souza, an alleged witness in the Cordelia drugs case, was booked by the CBI for allegedly trying to extort INR 25 crore from Khan. The plea is set to be heard on Wednesday.
MUMBAI: Sanville aka Sam D’Souza, a business consultant who allegedly ‘brokered a deal’ to help Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan in the drugs-on-cruise case, filed an anticipatory bail plea on Tuesday before a sessions court.
D’Souza along with IRS officer Sameer Wankhede and three others were booked by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for allegedly trying to extort ₹25 crore from Shah Rukh Khan for not booking Aryan in the drugs case.
D’Souza’s plea is scheduled to come up for hearing before special CBI judge MR Purwar on Wednesday. D’Souza was cited as one of the witnesses in the Cordelia drugs case.
On October 2, 2021, a team from the NCB’s Mumbai zonal unit carried out a search on the Goa-bound Cordelia cruise and arrested actor Aryan Khan, his friend Arbaaz Merchant, and others, including two women, and allegedly seized some narcotics. After a spate of allegations against Wankhede, the then zonal director of NCB, the agency appointed a special investigating team, which reviewed the case and in May 2022 decided not to charge-sheet Aryan and five others in the drugs case, as no contraband material was seized from them.
The NCB set up a Special Enquiry Team (SIT) after Prabhakar Sail, a panch witness in the drugs case, claimed that then NCB officers tried to extort ₹25 crore from Shah Rukh Khan for letting off his son. In an affidavit, Sail, who worked as a driver for KP Gosavi, another witness in the NCB case and one of the accused in the CBI case, alleged that he had overheard telephonic conversations between Gosavi and another person discussing a ₹25-crore deal.
Sail died of a heart attack in April 2022.
The CBI on May 11 registered an FIR against Wankhede, Vishwa Vijay Singh, then NCB superintendent, Ashish Ranjan, then intelligence officer of the NCB’s Mumbai zonal unit, and private individuals Gosavi, Sanville D’Souza under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Prevention of Corruption Act.
The agency has accused the five people of conspiring to extort ₹25 crore from Shah Rukh Khan in lieu of not booking his son in the cruise drugs bust case and subsequently obtaining a bribe of ₹50 lakh from the actor.
D’Souza had last week approached the Bombay high court for quashing the case against him and also sought interim protection from coercive action, as was granted by the high court to Wankhede.
D’Souza had claimed in the petition filed on May 24 that there was only a line in the FIR against him which said that he was accused of aiding KP Gosavi, who had allegedly tried to extort the money from Shah Rukh Khan, and hence, should be granted interim protection at par with main accused Wankhede.
High court, however, refused to grant relief to D’souza, stating that being a private individual, the grounds available to Wankhede were not available to him. D’Souza on Tuesday approached the special CBI court in the sessions for pre-arrest bail.