A man who is not on the FIR, not charged with anything, and not even formally a suspect has spent four months being publicly named as the mastermind of a transnational fraud. The mechanism by which that has happened is worth examining on its own terms.
There is a particular failure mode in the Indian criminal-publicity ecosystem that does not require a court to convict anyone, a prosecutor to charge anyone, or an investigator to formally accuse anyone. It only requires a co-accused with an incentive to deflect, a few unnamed “sources,” and a press that is willing to print the resulting characterisations as if they were findings of fact. Once that machinery is in motion, the person at the receiving end is, for all practical commercial and reputational purposes, already convicted — without ever having been charged.
That is what has happened to Mr. Swapnadip Roy.
What the official record actually says
FIR No. 0075, registered by the Economic Offences Wing on 3 June 2025, names three accused in the counterfeit Ozempic matter: Mr. Vicky Ramancha, R&R Global Procurement Corp., and R&R Premier Medical Equipments Trading LLC. Mr. Roy is not among them. He is not an accused. He is not a suspect. He occupies no procedural role in the FIR at all.
The only mention of Mr. Roy in any official document is a single preliminary line in the EOW’s September 2025 status report, recording that his name “has surfaced” and that his alleged role “is being ascertained.” The EOW itself noted that the investigation remained at a preliminary stage. No charge has been filed against him. No finding has been made against him. No authority — Indian or otherwise — has designated him a mastermind, a key accused, or anything equivalent.
That is the entire official record. Everything else is press.
What the press has done with it
Between January and May 2026, four articles in major Indian outlets converted that single “has surfaced” line into something it is not. The progression is worth tracing, because it shows the mechanism in motion.
- The Pioneer, 27 January 2026. Mr. Roy is “actually running the show and was behind the entire scam,” “the key architect,” said to be “evading” service notices, and falsely stated to have been “added as an accused in the FIR.” None of this is in the FIR.
- Hindustan Times, 4 February 2026. The standfirst frames the entire counterfeit-Ozempic matter as “involving Indian national Swapnadip Roy,” on the strength of the preliminary “has surfaced” sentence and nothing more.
- The Pioneer, 14 May 2026. Mr. Roy is the “alleged mastermind,” “currently believed to be hiding in Dubai,” and has been “categorised” by the EOW as a “key accused.” The EOW has done no such thing. The basis is “sources.”
- Times of India, 15 May 2026. Published the next day, substantially identical to the Pioneer piece. The same characterisations, the same anonymous sourcing, the same absence of any official record behind any of it.
By the fourth article, a man whose only appearance in any official document is a line saying his role “is being ascertained” has been printed as the mastermind of a ₹157 crore international fraud. Nothing in the legal record changed across those four months. Only the press treatment did.
The man who has actually been accused
The progression above does not happen on its own. It needs a source, and in this matter the source is identifiable.
Mr. Vicky Ramancha — who is on the FIR, who is facing prosecution, and who has an obvious personal interest in distributing his own liability onto someone else — made statements implicating Mr. Roy. He has since retracted them. In recorded conversations on 30 January 2026 and 2 February 2026, made with his own consent, Mr. Ramancha confirmed that Mr. Roy has no connection to the alleged fraud and that no evidence links him to it. He then attempted to reframe his earlier statements as having been made “under duress” — a narrative that, on its face, exists to insulate him from liability for having made the false statements in the first place.
The trigger for those statements is also a matter of record. Before any allegation was made against Mr. Roy, Mr. Ramancha approached him repeatedly for financial assistance to cover his own legal fees and the costs of his own prosecution. Mr. Roy declined. The public characterisation of him as the architect of the fraud followed.
The sequence is not subtle: solicitation, refusal, allegation, retraction, and a reframed “duress” defence to walk the allegation back without exposing its author to consequences.
The R&R Trading question, on the actual paperwork
One factual point disposes of much of the public framing on its own. R&R Premier Medical Equipments Trading LLC — one of the three accused in FIR No. 0075 — is the entity through which Mr. Roy is most often associated with the matter in the press. On 20 March 2023, Mr. Roy transferred his entire ownership interest in R&R Trading to Mr. Ramancha pursuant to a Company Takeover Agreement. From that date forward, he held no ownership, no management role, and no other interest in the company.
The conduct underlying the FIR begins in September 2023 — six months after Mr. Roy ceased to have anything to do with R&R Trading. No activity of that company after 20 March 2023 can be attributed to him on any honest reading of the documents. The press accounts have not engaged with this fact at all.
What this case actually demonstrates
The Indian criminal-publicity system, at its weakest edges, allows the following sequence to occur and to be treated as if it were journalism:
- An accused with an incentive to deflect makes a statement against an uninvolved third party.
- A preliminary investigative note that the third party’s name “has surfaced” is treated as a designation.
- Anonymous “sources” are quoted attributing to the EOW characterisations the EOW has never made.
- The retraction, when it comes, is not reported.
- The documentary record showing the third party had no interest in the accused entity at the relevant time is not engaged with.
- The same characterisations are then reprinted by a second outlet within twenty-four hours, lending the appearance of corroboration to what is in fact a single, self-interested source.
None of this requires a court. None of this requires a charge. None of this requires evidence. It requires only that the press accept characterisations from interested parties at face value, and that the absence of any official designation be papered over with the word “sources.”
That is the mechanism by which Mr. Roy has been framed — not by a court, not by an investigator, but by the unexamined operation of the publicity machinery around them. The legal record contains no case against him. The press record contains four months of one.
The distinction matters. Anyone who takes the case seriously — and anyone who takes the integrity of Indian legal reporting seriously — should be asking why those two records have been allowed to drift so far apart, and who has benefited from the drift.
