Quattrocchi, they say is not a fugitive now and Bofors they say is just a ghost!!!

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is known to be a straight-forward man apart from being one who adores the IMF-World Bank scheme of development. It is, hence, no wonder that he rants against corruption and has even gone to town, recently, that the Government would enact a law to confiscate the property of those who are found corrupt.

Dr. Singh may even mean it. But then he certainly does not mean any of this when it comes to those who are perceived to be Sonia Gandhi’s friends. A proof of this came this week when Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam told the Supreme Court that the Government decided to drop the case against Ottavio Quattrocchi. Well. For those readers who were born after 1989, Quattrocchi is that Italian national who received kickbacks from Bofors, the Swedish gun manufacturer in return for his ``services’’ pushing through a deal involving purchases of 155 mm Howitzer guns by the Government of India in 1986.

There were others who were established agents in defence purchases and among them was Win Chadha. He too was paid off by Bofors for the deal. And then there were the Hinduja brothers who were also paid certain sums by Bofors as part of the same deal. This man called Quattrocchi, however, was neither a defence spare dealer nor an agent. He was the India representative of an Italian multinational called Snam Progetti. And that company was dealing with projects involved in erecting fertilizer manufacturing plants.

This did not qualify Quattrocchi to get money from Bofors. Instead, he qualified to be paid off by the arms company because he happened to be a friend of Sonia Gandhi; and that too at a time when Sonia husband, Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India; and it so happened that Bofors, at that time, was running into some trouble due to fall in its order book and hence desperate to see through the deal to sell 400 of the 155 mm howitzer field guns to the Government without loss of time.

To cut a long story short, the contract between the Government of India and the Bofors company was that the deal excluded middlemen (agents in other words) and hence there was no way that the company could have paid money even to Chadha and the Hindujas. And Quattrocchi, in any case, had nothing to do with the business. And after all the preliminary formalities the army decided firmly in favour of Bofors (rejecting the French gun Sofma) price negotiations began on December 13, 1985 and concluded on March 23, 1986. The gun manufacturer had just about a week to clinch the deal after the price negotiations.

The point was that if the deal was not clinched before March 31, 1986, the budget allocations would lapse and the company would have had to wait for some months before it was reopened and clinched. Bofors knew the way to get over this and that was where Quattrocchi came in. The friend of the Prime Minister’s wife was powerful enough to get such things done. And he managed that. The Rajiv Gandhi government took just 24 hours to endorse that recommendation and the contract was signed on March 24, 1986.

And Quattrocchi did not do all that to ensure that the Indian army was equipped adequately with the gun. Instead, he received money for the ``services’’ from Bofors. The Swedish Natiopnal Audit Bureau revealed that Bofors had deposited as much as 250 million US Dollars (Rs. 64 Crores by the exchange rate at that time) into three coded accounts in a Swiss Bank: Svenska, Pitco, and AE Services. While Svenska belonged to Chadha, Pitco belonged to the Hindujas. And AE Services belonged to Quattrocchi.

The CBI knows for sure that 73 lakh US Dollars (Rs. 18.7 Crores going by the exchange rates at that time) went into Quattrocchi’s account in the Nordfinanz Bank in Zurich. The deposit was made on September 3, 1986. The CBI also knows that most of the funds were transferred to the Union Bank of Switzerland, Geneva into the account of Colbar Invesment and moved out of that account too (within a couple of months) to yet another bank in the British Channel Islands by this man called Quattocchi. He lived in New Delhi, playing golf and attending parties until July 29, 1993 before flying off to Malaysia. An Interpol red corner notice on request from the CBI led to his arrest in Argentina; but the CBI, then under Manmohan Singh’s UPA-I let him go by fighting the case badly.

And the declaration now that the case against the Italian fugitive will be dropped because efforts to catch him did not succeed even while Manmohan Singh is raving and ranting against corruption is certainly ridiculous. Well, we the people of India seem to have learnt to tolerate the corrupt be they from the secular, the communal of ``innocent’’ lot.