Bofors Scandal
Bofors Scandal
The Bofors Scandal was a major corruption scandal in India in the 1980's. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and several other top officials were accused of receiving kickbacks from arms producer Bofors AB for winning a bid to supply India with 155 millimetre field Howitzer guns. It is believed that the scale of the scandal led to the loss of the Congress party in the 1989 general election. The case came to light during Vishwanath Pratap Singh's tenure as defence minister, and was revealed through investigative journalism by Chitra Subramaniam and N. Ram of the newspapers the Indian Express and The Hindu. The name of the middleman associated with having brokered the deal is Ottavio Quattrocchi, an Italian businessman known to have close ties to Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi. In 1997, the Swiss banks released some 500 documents after years of legal and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a case against Quattrocchi, Win Chadha, also naming Rajiv Gandhi, the defence secretary S. K. Bhatnagar and a number of others.
In February 2004, the Delhi High Court quashed the charges of bribery against Rajiv Gandhi and the others, and in May 2005 dismissed allegations against the Hinduja brothers. The Indian Government asked the British Government to defreeze two accounts belonging to Quattrocchi. Soon after the request, they asked the British government to refreeze the accounts, but a sum total of $4.6 million had already been withdrawn. Quattrocchi was arrested by Argentine police in 2006, and the Indian government pleaded for his extradition, but lost the case because they did not present a key court order as evidence. In the aftermath, the government did not appeal this decision owing delays in securing an official English translation of the court's decision. The Italian businessman no longer figures in the CBI's list of wanted persons and the 12-year Interpol red corner notice against the lone surviving suspect in the Bofors payoff case has been withdrawn from the agency’s website after the CBI’s appeal
