rediff.com: Bofors papers may fail to nail culprits


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February 17, 2000

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Bofors papers may fail to nail culprits

George Iype in New Delhi

The Central Bureau of Investigation has nearly completed scrutinising the last batch of secret Bofors papers received from Switzerland, but they do not contain any conclusive evidence to trace the identities of those who received kickbacks in the controversial defence deal.

CBI sources said that ever since the last set of 100-odd Bofors papers landed in India on December 20, a team of sleuths has been examining them to unravel fresh information on the 13-year-old multi-million-dollar gun purchase scandal.

"The scrutiny will be completed soon and a report will be submitted to the home ministry. But we doubt the papers reveal any hard evidence to fix the guilty in a court of law," a CBI officer told rediff.com

The officer said the last batch of secret papers had certainly "thrown up some names involved in the deal". "But the papers do not answer our effort to locate the end use of the money paid by Bofors," he said, adding that they "are of no use" if they do not actually bring out the monetary links.

The CBI sources said the last set of documents also looks likely to end up like the first batch of 500 pages of secret bank documents that the apex agency received in 1997. The agency scrutinised those papers and prepared a 300-page report that listed the accused and suspects involved in the Rs 640 million bribery scandal.

That report named Italian businessmen Ottavio Quattrocchi, non-resident Indian arms dealer Win Chaddha, the Hinduja brothers, and the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi as accused.

In the light of the report, the CBI examined former ministers Arun Singh and Arun Nehru, former army chief, the late General Krishnaswamy Sundarji and former defence secretary S K Bhatnagar.

But since then the CBI has not made any breakthrough in the case, for two reasons. First, the agency has not succeeded in getting details of the money transactions from tax havens like Panama, the Channel Islands, Isle of Man and Liechtenstein, where the payoff monies travelled from the coded Swiss bank accounts.

Second, despite its best efforts over the last few years, the CBI has been unable to extradite Quattrocchi from Malaysia and Chaddha from Dubai.

Thus, the last set of papers may also not deliver the desired results if simultaneous breakthroughs do not occur in other countries. "Scrutinising the Bofors papers will not help much if we are unable to locate the end use of the bribery money," an officer said.

But if the CBI fails to get definite leads from the last batch of documents, the first casualty may be its chargesheet against the late Rajiv Gandhi. "Charges against Gandhi and others will not stick if we are unable to produce any hard evidence from the papers," the officer admitted. The opposition led by the Congress has all along been alleging that the government's decision to indict Gandhi was politically motivated.

Along with the scrutiny of the final set of documents, the CBI is moving ahead with two plans to fix the Bofors case forever. First, in the past month, it has already despatched letters rogatory to the Bahamas, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Austria, Panama and Jordan to piece together the monetary links of the bribery transactions. Secondly, it is planning to prepare supplementary chargesheets against the accused in the Bofors scandal.

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