How a polo-loving businessman was a secret global drug lord | UK News

On the surface, Muhammed Asif Hafeez was an upstanding individual.

A global businessman and ambassador of a prestigious London polo club, he rubbed shoulders with the British elite, including members of the Royal Family.

He also regularly passed on detailed information to the authorities in the UK and Middle East that, in some cases, led to the interception of huge shipments of drugs. He was motivated, he said, simply by what he saw as his “moral obligation to curb and highlight criminal activities”.

At least, that is what he would have had people think.

In reality, Hafeez was himself what US officials described as “one of the world’s most prolific drug traffickers”.

From his residence in the UK, he was the puppet-master of a vast drugs empire, supplying many tonnes of heroin, methamphetamine and hashish from bases in Pakistan and India that were distributed across the world. The gangs he informed on were his rivals – and his motivation was to rid the market of his competitors.

His status in the underworld earned him the moniker “the Sultan”.

But this criminal power and prestige would not last forever. After a complex joint operation between the British and American authorities, Hafeez, 66, was extradited from the UK in 2023. He pleaded guilty last November.

On Friday, he was sentenced to 16 years in a New York prison for conspiring to import drugs – including enough heroin for “millions of doses” – into the US. Having been in custody since 2017, Hafeez’s sentence will end in 2033.

The has closely followed Hafeez’s case. We have pieced together information from court documents, corporate listings and interviews with people who knew him.

We wanted to find out how he managed to stay under the radar for so long – and how he eventually got caught.

Hafeez was born in September 1958 to a middle-class family in Lahore, Pakistan. One of six children, his upbringing was comfortable. People in Lahore who knew the family told the that his father had owned a factory near the city. Hafeez also later told a US court that he had trained as a commercial pilot.

From the early 1990s to about the mid-2010s, he ran an outwardly legitimate umbrella company called Sarwani International Corporation, with subsidiary businesses in Pakistan, the UAE and the UK.

According to its website – which has since been shut down – it sold technical equipment to militaries, governments and police forces throughout the world, including equipment for drug detection.

Among the other businesses under the Sarwani umbrella were a textiles company registered in various countries, an Italian restaurant in Lahore that was a franchise of a well-known Knightsbridge brand, and a company named Tipmoor, based near Windsor to the west of London, which specialised in “polo and equestrian services”.

These businesses not only afforded him a luxury lifestyle, but secured him access to the UK’s most exclusive circles. He was listed as an international ambassador for the prestigious Ham Polo Club for at least three years, from 2009 to 2011. He and his wife Shahina were also photographed chatting to Prince William, and embracing Prince Harry, at the club in 2009.

Ham Polo Club told the that Hafeez had never been a member of the club, that the club no longer has “ambassadors”, and that the current board “has no ties to him”. It added that the event at which Hafeez and his wife were photographed meeting the princes “was run by a third party”.

Sarwani’s different global arms were dissolved at various stages in the 2010s, according to their listings on Companies House and equivalent global registries.

A former Sarwani employee based in the UAE told the he suspected there had been “something fishy going on” when he worked for the business, because even big projects were “only paid for in cash”. The employee – who has asked not to be identified, for fear of reprisals – said he eventually left the business because he felt uncomfortable with this.

“There were no [bank] transactions, no records, no existence,” he told the .

Hafeez would also periodically write letters to the authorities in the UAE and UK informing on rival cartels, under the guise of being a concerned member of the public.

The has seen these, as well as letters he received in response from the British Embassy in Dubai and the UK Home Office, thanking him and expressing their appreciation for him getting in touch.

The Home Office told the it does not comment on individual correspondence.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Government of Dubai were contacted by the for comment but did not respond.

Members of Hafeez’s family shared these letters with the in 2018, while he was embroiled in a lengthy legal fight against extradition to the US.

They also submitted them to courts in the UK and, later, to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), as evidence that he had been an informant and needed protection. All the courts disagreed and ruled that this was a ploy by Hafeez to rid the market of competitors.

Hafeez, the ECHR said, was “someone who had brought to the attention of the authorities the criminal conduct of others who he knew to be actual or potential rivals to his substantial criminal enterprise”.

While Hafeez was writing these letters, a meeting took place in 2014 that – despite him not being there – would lead to his downfall.

Two of Hafeez’s close associates met a potential buyer from Colombia in a flat in Mombasa, Kenya. They burned a small amount of heroin in order to demonstrate how pure it was, and said they could supply him with any quantity of “100%… white crystal”.

The supplier of this high-quality heroin, they had told the buyer, was a man from Pakistan known as “the Sultan” – that is, Hafeez.

What they would soon learn was that the “buyer” from Colombia was actually working undercover for the US’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The entire meeting was part of an elaborate sting operation, and had been covertly filmed – footage that has been obtained by the .

US court documents reveal the deal was co-ordinated by Baktash and Ibrahim Akasha, two brothers who led a violent cartel in Kenya. Their father was himself a feared kingpin who had been killed in Amsterdam’s Red Light District in 2000.

The deal also involved Vijaygiri “Vicky” Goswami, an Indian national who managed the Akashas’ operations.

In October 2014, with the Akashas, Goswami and Hafeez still unaware of who the buyers really were, 99kg of heroin and 2kg of crystal meth were delivered to the fake Colombian traffickers. The Akashas promised to provide hundreds of kilograms more of each drug.

A month later, the Akasha brothers and Goswami were arrested in Mombasa. They were released on bail shortly afterwards, and spent over two years fighting extradition to the US.

In the background, American law enforcers were working with counterparts in the UK to piece together their case against Hafeez, partly using evidence gathered from devices they had seized when they arrested Goswami and the Akasha brothers. On those, they had found multiple references to Hafeez as a major supplier, and were able to find enough evidence to identify him as “the Sultan”.

Facing charges in the US didn’t stop one of the men, Goswami, from continuing his illegal enterprise. In 2015, while on bail in Kenya, he hatched a plan with Hafeez to transport several tonnes of a drug called ephedrine from a chemical factory in Solapur, India, to Mozambique.

Ephedrine, a powerful medication that is legal in limited quantities, is used to make methamphetamine. The two men – Goswami and Hafeez – planned to set up a meth factory in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, US court documents show. But their scheme was abandoned in 2016, when police raided the Solapur plant and seized 18 tonnes of ephedrine.

The Akasha brothers and Goswami finally boarded a flight to the US to face trial in January 2017.

Hafeez was arrested eight months later in London, at his flat in the affluent St John’s Wood neighbourhood. He was detained at high security Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, and it was from there that he spent six years fighting extradition to the US.

A big development happened in 2019 in the US. Goswami pleaded guilty, and told a New York court he had agreed to co-operate with prosecutors. The Akasha brothers also pleaded guilty.

Baktash Akasha was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His brother Ibrahim was sentenced to 23 years.

Goswami, who is yet to be sentenced, would have testified against Hafeez in the US had the case gone to trial.

From Belmarsh, Hafeez was running out of options.

He tried to stop extradition to the US – but failed to convince magistrates, the High Court in London and the ECHR that he had, in fact, been an informant to the authorities who was “at risk of ill-treatment from his fellow prisoners” as a result.

He also claimed the conditions in a US prison would be “inhuman and degrading” for him because of his health conditions, including type 2 diabetes and asthma.

He lost all of these arguments at every stage and was extradited in May 2023.

His case did not go to trial. In November last year, Hafeez pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiring to manufacture and distribute heroin, methamphetamine and hashish and to import them into the US.

Pre-sentencing, prosecutors described the “extremely fortunate circumstances” of Hafeez’s life, which “throw into harsh relief his decision to scheme… and to profit from the distribution of dangerous substances that destroy lives and whole communities”.

“Unlike many traffickers whose drug activities are borne, at least in part, from desperation, poverty, and a lack of educational opportunities,” they said, “the defendant has lived a life replete with privilege and choice.”