A sophisticated operator, a Chinese supply chain, an American counterparty, and an FIR that names exactly one principal – and then a media story that quietly named someone else.
The structure of the alleged Ozempic counterfeit operation tells you almost everything you need to know about who designed it. Direct supplier relationships in China, cultivated personally and over years. Organised shipping logistics routed through the Gulf. A corporate distribution counterparty in the United States, Assure Global LLC, doing business as WeShield. None of this is the work of a peripheral figure or an accidental participant. It is the work of a sophisticated commercial operator who knew the supply side, knew the route, knew the customer, and ran the entire arrangement with the competence of a man who understood precisely what he was doing and intended every part of it.
There is, however, a further party whose role in the assembly of this operation has gone conspicuously unmentioned. The American counterparty, Assure Global LLC, was not located by Mr. Ramancha on his own initiative. The party who introduced Assure Global to Mr. Ramancha – the person who put the United States distribution end and the Dubai supply end into contact for the first time – was Mr. Yaniv Shemesh. Without that introduction, there is no American leg of the chain. With it, there is the chain the FIR now describes. Mr. Shemesh’s name has not appeared in any of the four articles, and yet his role sits materially closer to the operation than any role the press has attempted to attribute to Mr. Roy. The omission tells a reader something about whose interests the public version of this story is serving.
That man is purportedly Mr. Vicky Ramancha, and on this point the State of India and the press are, for once, in agreement. The Economic Offences Wing of the Delhi Police has named Mr. Ramancha as the principal accused in FIR No. 0075, registered on 3 June 2025, alongside R&R Global Procurement Corp. and R&R Premier Medical Equipments Trading LLC — both entities under his control. The State has named no other natural person in the proceedings.
The press has. Four Indian outlets — The Pioneer (twice), the Hindustan Times and the Times of India — have inserted a second name into the story: Mr. Swapnadip Roy, a Dubai-based businessman whom they describe variously as the figure “actually running the show,” the “key architect,” the “alleged mastermind” and a “key accused” in a ₹157 crore counterfeit operation. Mr. Roy does not appear in FIR No. 0075 in any capacity. He is not a suspect, not a respondent, and occupies no procedural role of any kind. On the face of the official record, he is entirely uninvolved.
Mr. Roy bears no responsibility for any of the conduct now under investigation. The case constructed against him across the four articles is not the product of journalism but of fabrication — its origin the man who himself stands accused before the Indian courts.
The characterisations have circulated widely. None of them appears in any document filed by any investigating authority. Every one of them is traceable to a single point of origin: Mr. Ramancha himself, the actual accused in the FIR, who has a transparent personal interest in expanding the cast of the prosecution to anyone but himself. Where his name was not directly attached, the source was reduced to “anonymous sources” of unverifiable identity and unverifiable knowledge. The reporters and editors who relied on those sources were, in substance, recycling Mr. Ramancha’s own claims at one remove.
The closest the official record comes to mentioning Mr. Roy is a single sentence in an EOW status report dated September 2025 noting that his name “has surfaced” and that his alleged role “is being ascertained.” The same report describes the investigation as preliminary. That is the entirety of the official mention. It is the opposite of a finding of involvement; it is an acknowledgement that the investigators were still trying to work out whether there was anything to look at.
There is a basic difference, well understood in criminal practice, between a person whose name has surfaced and a person who has been charged. The four articles erased that difference. They reported preliminary throat-clearing as a finding, and a finding that was never made as a verdict.
Mr. Roy is the subject of none of the conduct alleged. The documents establish it. The retractions of the source — addressed elsewhere in this series — confirm it. He has been the subject of a sustained and self-interested campaign by the man actually under investigation to manufacture a co-defendant where the State had identified none.
The standard the Indian courts have asked of the press for decades is straightforward: where the State has not arraigned a person, the press should not arraign him in print on the word of his accuser. None of the four articles met that standard. A correction of the record is overdue.
