Thaindian News

New Delhi, March 4 (IANS) Till the case was closed Friday, Ottavio Quattrocchi was a wanted fugitive in India for his alleged involvement in the multi-crore Bofors gun scam.

But now he can visit the country a free man.

A Delhi court Friday closed the Rs.640 million Bofors kickbacks case on the plea by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), dropping criminal charges against Quattrocchi, the only accused still alive in one of the country’s biggest scandals.

The most dramatic fact about Quattrocchi is that he is an Italian businessman who is said to have played the middlemam for the Swedish Bofors company to secure the deal for the supply of over 400 155mm Howitzers to India.

India’s premier probe agency, the CBI, spent nearly two decades and Rs.250 crore on his trail for probing his involvement in receiving kickbacks in the Rs.15-billion gun deal of 1986.

But he evaded arrest, sometimes giving the CBI the slip under its nose.

Now he no longer remains wanted in India, Prashant Bhushan, senior Supreme Court lawyer, told IANS.

“If the case has been closed and the criminal proceedings closed, Quattrocchi can visit India and cannot be arrested,” he said.

How was Quattrocchi connected to Bofors.

He visited India in 1960s as a representative of Snamprogetti, a Milan-based Italian multinational engineering and construction firm. He was with the company for 16 years.

The scandal erupted in 1987 when Swedish radio revealed that Bofors, facing stiff competition from other defence firms, had paid million of dollars to middleman Quattrocchi and arms agent Win Chadha to secure the contract for the sale of field guns.

Indian law prohibits middlemen or agents in defence deals.

The Italian was reportedly close to the Gandhi family.

Opposition leaders have been claiming that Quattrocchi was politically so well connected in India to be part of a defence deal.

Senior BJP leader L.K. Advani recently alleged that Congress president Sonia Gandhi had a close association with Quattrocchi and that he was a “regular” at her house.

Nearly six years after the scam surfaced, Swiss authorities informed the Indian government in 1993 that the kickbacks in the Bofors gun supply were deposited in Quattrocchi’s bank accounts in Switzerland.

Quattrochi was in India then, but he quietly left the country under mysterious circumstances and left for Malaysia in July that year, from where he fled to Italy.

The CBI’s efforts to get Quattrocchi extradited to India never succeeded even as an Interpol notice too wanted him because he and his wife “were involved in fraud and bribery committed in India between 1982-1987.”

“A percentage of the money paid by the Indian government was illegally transferred by the AB Bofors Company to bank accounts in Switzerland, to the benefit of certain Indian public servants and their nominees,” the Interpol notice said.

He was held in Argentina in February 2007 on the basis of an Interpol warrant. That was the nearest the CBI came to him.

The CBI asked the external affairs ministry to send an extradition request to the government of Argentina.

But Indian authorities took time in translating documents that were to be presented in the designated Argentine court. India finally lost the extradition case four months later.

The 12-year Interpol notice was taken off from the “wanted” section of the agency’s website in 2010.

Even though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had assured parliament that the “law of the land will prevail” to pursue the Bofors case, the opposition voiced scepticism whether the government would seriously bring the Bofors riddle to its conclusion.