Airbus deal in its final round

A high power group of ministers on Tuesday met for nearly four hours at the finance minister's office and saw a special presentation made by Airbus Industrie as part of the final price negotiations for the purchase of 43 Airbus aircraft by state-owned Indian Airlines.

The presentation was made to Finance Minister P Chidambaram, Law Minister H R Bhardwaj, Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel and Minister for Programme Implementation Oscar Fernandes, who form the recently constituted empowered Group of Ministers.

The presentation comes in the wake of the continuing Indo-US aviation engagements both at the civil and defence levels.

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Praful Patel said the E-GOM will meet on Wednesday and finalise the deal.

The deal might be announced on Wednesday itself on the auspicious day of Ganesh Chaturti, which Patel strongly believes in as any politician from Maharashtra would.

Another reason for the announcement is that India does not want to give out any wrong signals, especially when British Prime Minister Tony Blair is in India for high level Indo-EU summit talks as well as Indo-UK bilateral discussions.

For Britain it is important to convey to other EU members, primarily France, that it is as keen as any other EU member that the Airbus deal is clinched.

Further, Britain is also a member of the Airbus Industrie Consortium.

However, individually, Britain has already bagged the massive Advanced Jet Trainer deal last year when the National Democratic Alliance government was on its way out.