HVK Archives: In pursuit of MR
In pursuit of MR - India Today
Harish Gupta
()
May 4, 1998
Title: In pursuit of MR
Author: Harish Gupta
Publication: India Today
Date: May 4, 1998
Like any good Sicilian, Ottavio Quattrocchi is a cautious man-
unhurried, deliberate and not prone to impulsive action. So when
the former Delhi representative of Snamprogetti, the Italian
fertiliser and petro-sector company, recently moved a petition
before the Delhi High Court seeking the revocation of a non-
bailable warrant (NBW) issued against him, it was clear he was
worried. And desperate.
Following the issuance of the NBW and the subsequent Interpol red
alert, Quattrocchi is a hunted man. He could be arrested at the
airports of any country which is a signatory to the Interpol
treaty. As his lawyer, Dinesh Mathur, puts it, Quattrocchi has
faced "great difficulty in his travel to certain countries which
have refused to grant him a visa. This has affected his right to
freely move about for his business purposes".
Not since the night of July 30, 1993, when he surreptitiously
boarded a Lufthansa flight to Milan and skulked away from the
country where he had made his fortune, had Quattrocchi bothered
about the law agencies in Delhi. Instead, he had moved to Kuala
Lumpur in the hope that the controversy over his role in the
infamous Bofors gun deal would die away-and that his one-time
proximity to the Gandhi family would be forgotten.
Since his flight from India, it has been claimed by the CBI that
commissions from Bofors reached Quattrocchi's Swiss bank
accounts. He holds the key, therefore, to the bribes scandal.
Yet, instead of insulating him from further trouble,
Quattrocchi's petition has only succeeded in opening a can of
worms.
First, he sought to refute the CBI's contention that he was a
"recipient of fruits of fraud". Quattrocchi insisted he had no
connection with the culmination of the Bofors transaction and
that there had been "no communication between Bofors and the
petitioner". So far so good. Then, the CBI-led by Trinath Mishra,
the new director appointed by the BJP-led Government-decided to
act.
To firmly implicate Quattrocchi, the CBI revealed hitherto "top
secret" details of payments made by AB Bofors to middlemen and
also indicated the route the bribes had taken (see graphic). This
information formed part of the CBI's 30-page affidavit. It had
never left the agency's offices previously, not since it arrived
>from Switzerland in 1997. One of the conditions imposed by the
Swiss government was that the papers would be used only as
evidence during prosecution, not for political purposes. That is
why the bank-related documents had been kept even from
Parliament.
The CBI's affidavit was political dynamite. For the first time it
formally stated that Quattrocchi had been engaged as AB Bofors'
agent only due to his "close proximity to the then prime minister
Rajiv Gandhi and his family". The affidavit also spoke of the
general perception among ministers and bureaucrats that
Quattrocchi was vastly influential and could swing even a
contract running into millions of dollars.
To the mortification of the Congress, the CBI was unrelenting in
talking about the Rajiv-Quattrocchi nexus: "The investigation has
shown that the families of the then prime minister of India and
Mr Ottavio Quattrocchi were on very intimate terms to each other
and they used to meet frequently. Mr Quattrocchi's family had
free access to the prime minister's house. The closeness of the
two families is also proved by some photographs collected during
the investigation. As a result, Mr Quattrocchi was able to
project himself as a person of great influence."
For a case that is over 10 years old-the allegations of bribery
were first made in 198 7-it is amazing the pieces are falling
into place only now. Incriminating documents have been fetched
>from Switzerland on but two occasions: in 1990 when V.P. Singh
was prime minister and in 1997 when H.D. Deve Gowda was heading
the government. Over eight years, the CBI remained silent on the
Rajiv-Quattrocchi link. This period saw Chandra Shekhar, P.V.
Narasimha Rao, Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral in office as-Congress
prime ministers or Congress-dependent ones.
Just before he demitted office, Gujral claimed he had given the
CBI permission to prosecute Madhavsinh Solanki, the Congress
politician who as Rao's foreign minister in 1992 was accused of
trying to scuttle the Bofors probe. Even so, Gujral seems to
have done his bit to slacken the investigation. As prime
minister, he sacked Joginder Singh, the CBI chief who brought the
key bank documents from Switzerland a year ago. Singh now says he
worked overtime to get the case to the prosecution stage but was
asked to "go slow" by Gujral.
Yet, Singh's labours are bearing fruit now. For instance, the
movement of the bribe money is well-documented. Crucial details
have been provided by Myles Tweedale Stott, representative of AE
Services. This was a shell company promised a commission by
Bofors should it win the contract. In an affidavit sworn before a
Swiss court, Stott admits that Quattrocchi's was more than just a
consultancy role and "his involvement was greater than I had
first imagined". In fact, it was Quattrocchi who made the initial
move when in November 1985, he approached Stott to discuss
Bofors' chances of winning the lucrative Indian defence contract.
Stott's affidavit clarifies that AE Services, a firm registered
in the UK, was itself a subsidiary of a company called Ciaou
Anstalt Vaduz (CAV) and owned by S.I. Mubarak and his wife Ritta.
The mysterious Mubaraks are about as familiar as the yeti. Nobody
knows who they are. Yet, it was they and Major R.A. "Bob" Wilson,
CAV's authorised representative, who instructed Stott on how to
operate AE Services' bank accounts. Wilson, on his part, was a
good friend of Martin Ardbo, president of Bofors.
Stott also confesses that CAV worked on behalf of Sofma, a French
munitions manufacturer. Sofma was a strong contender for the
howitzer contract which Bofors eventually won. Due to the
conflict of interest, the relationship between CAV and AE
Services was kept a secret at the time. it is clear today that
whoever won the Indian order-Bofors or Sofma-the intermediaries,
whether AE Services or CAV, would principally have been the same.
If this is a coincidence, it is a remarkable one.
There are other strange aspects to the Bofors story. For about a
decade, Quattrocchi has had access to the commission ($7.34
million in 1986) paid by Bofors. Yet, he has never withdrawn it.
He has only transferred it, from one account to the next, one
country to another. This has led to the question: is Quattrocchi
the end-recipient or is he looking after the money for somebody
else? The money currently lies in two, as yet unknown Austrian
and Swiss accounts. The Bofors saga can only continue when the
CBI makes some headway with these two accounts.
Whatever suspicions his years of fervid banking may evoke,
Quattrocchi is seeking to present it all as innocuous financial
dealing. Lawyer Mathur says since the money has not been stolen
>from the government of India and has not been transferred to any
public servant here, there can be no case under the Prevention of
Corruption Act.
Quattrocchi's primary defence rests on the technicality that
there is still no evidence that the payments Bofors made to AE
Services were related to him. Nor that the money AE Services put
into his account was the money from Bofors. It could have been
an entirely different sum in an entirely unrelated business
transaction. Of course, it is puzzling why Quattrocchi, a
Snamprogetti employee, was the beneficiary of Bofors' largesse.
Quattrocchi is evasive here. His petition does not explicitly
state that he did not receive money in the deal. He only
stresses that the inquiry has "clearly belied" the accusation
that he received commissions from Bofors. How he has arrived at
this apparently self-contradictory conclusion is left
unexplained.
Quattrocchi's petition talks of no crime having been committed by
the Italian business agent as on the date of the FIR. It also
emphasises that the original FIR did not actually mention
Quattrocchi as a possible recipient of the Bofors slush money.
The FIR, filed during V.P. Singh's regime in 1990, spoke of
unknown public servants and others being the possible guilty.
Next Quattrocchi argues that Bofors' payments to him may have
violated the company's contract with the Indian government but
did not constitute a crime. Thus he seeks to distinguish between
a criminal act and a mere breach of contract.
It is obvious that Quattrocchi will exploit every legal loophole
to prevent being arrested. The Malaysian Government is
considering India's request to help take him into custody. His
wife Maria has been particularly shaken by the Interpol alert.
The upshot has been a harried Quattrocchi moving the high court
to have the NBW cancelled.
The court is still to decide on the petition. It is a decision
Quattrocchi will eagerly await for. So will India, at 10 janpath
and beyond.
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