Indian businessman and heir to the 283-year-old Wadia Group, Ness Wadia has been sentenced two year jail term over drug possession while he was on a skiing holiday in Japan.
Going by the reports of Financial Times, Wadia, who is the co-owner of the Kings XI Punjab cricket team, was arrested in early March at New Chitose Airport in the northern island of Hokkaido, after the customs officials found 25g of cannabis resin in his trouser pockets.
The report claimed that Wadia denied reports over his arrest but admitted to the possession of drugs saying that it was for his personal use.
He spent a period in detention before his indictment on March 20 and an undisclosed period of detention before a court hearing. The Sapporo District Court handed him a two-year prison sentence, which was suspended for five years, the Financial Times report added.
Ness was born on 30 May 1971 into the Parsi family in Liverpool, England. His mother, Maureen Wadia, a former flight attendant, started the Gladrags fashion magazine and is president of the Gladrags beauty pageants. His brother, Jehangir, is the head of the GoAir airline.
Read here: Who is Ness Wadia? Know all about Indian businessman arrested in japan over drug possession
Wadia has degrees in international relations from Tufts University in the US and engineering management from the University of Warwick in England. He obtained his master’s degree in management in 1998, in the middle of his career, and finished in 2001.
The Wadia group traces its history to a 1736 deal to build ships for the East India Company and now has businesses that include biscuit company Britannia Industries to budget airline GoAir, with the total market valuation of its listed entities standing at $13.1billion.
Till 2011, Ness Wadia was the joint managing director of Bombay Dyeing. Since he stepped down, he has been co-owner of the Punjab IPL team and managing director of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, a company which has holdings in most of the Wadia Group subsidiaries.
