Why there won’t be any progress on Bofors

In 2004, this columnist got a telephone call suggesting she should speak with Swedish police officer Sten Lindstrom, as he is ‘willing’ to spill the facts on the Bofors deal. He was the investigating officer for the kickbacks controversy that had raged in India long after it had turned to embers in Sweden, the first big proof as it were of commissions being given and taken in defence deals. I made the call, realised the story was too big for the telephone, and flew to Stockholm for eight to nine hours of a recorded interview with the still serving police officer who had been compelled to close the file under Swedish laws, but was not at all happy that the case remained unresolved.

Lindstrom was the classic cop, still in pursuit of a case he knew could be cracked with a little effort by the Indian government. His interview was sensational, to put it mildly, but since the reports carried by the newspaper I was working with at the time coincided with the general elections they were lost amidst charges hurled at us by both the Left and the Congress of ‘deliberately’ trying to sabotage a crucial poll by raising the Bofors bogey at a critical juncture.

This was a good eight years ago, when the cases against Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi were still open, when his crucial bank accounts in London were still frozen and a little pressure could have yielded big results. To cut a long story short, the UPA that came to power with the support of the Left moved skillfully to withdraw all the cases against Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s influential Italian friend, and gradually he walked away a completely free man. And with him, the last of the evidence too disappeared.

So, one can be excused for being cynical about the long speeches in Parliament this time around, the ‘let us get them’ declarations from the opposition as all had a chance over the years, but none grabbed it. Instead, they worked overtime to facilitate the Congress cover-up by spending more time in shooting the messengers, than in using the facts to crack the case. In 2004, when I asked Lindstrom to name some living persons who had full details of the Bofors kickbacks he responded without hesitation, ‘Martin Ardbo, Ottavio Quattrocchi and Sonia Gandhi.’

He added, ‘I have never said this before’ and went on to point towards the connections between then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and his wife Sonia Gandhi. This columnist incidentally had interviewed Quattrocchi several times in the past, and he had never really bothered to hide his friendship with Mrs Sonia Gandhi. That he was a security-cleared visitor to the prime minister’s residence at the time was a well known secret.

Bofors top boss Ardbo has since died, all cases against Quattrocchi have been withdrawn, and Sonia Gandhi is today among the world’s most powerful women. Lindstrom gave amazing details of the investigations during the course of the interview, of how the Hindujas and Win Chadha had received the bulk of the commission — 320 million Swedish kronor — but did not know the entire picture; of how the Swedish investigators had followed Ardbo’s diary until they had run into a wall in Switzerland as the details of the accounts were denied to them; of how the money paid to Quattrocchi was done fairly late in the deal and appeared to be a ‘sweetener’ for services rendered rather than payment for this particular deal; of how efforts to interrogate Sonia Gandhi had not been successful and so forth.

There were many firsts in that interview. It was for the first time that Lindstrom pointed to conclusive evidence establishing that money was paid from Bofors to AE Services to Colbar Investment, of which Quattrocchi was the direct beneficiary. It was also the first time that he gave details about his interrogation of Martin Ardbo and his links with the Indian and Swedish governments; that the deal between Bofors and AE Services was signed secretly at a later date, and by Ardbo instead of by the Bofors sales manager as was the practice. It was also the first time that Lindstrom spoke in detail about the parent company of AE Services, CIAOU, its Lawyer Bob Wilson, and the links between it and Quattrocchi in Delhi.

As Lindstrom put it, “If they heard that a particular government wanted defence helicopters they would contact a company manufacturing these and tell them, we have the connections with the concerned government to get you the deal, we can pave the way for it and you give us the money.” In the case of the Bofors deal, CIAOU set up the agreement between Bofors AB and its own company AE Services. Wilson, a colonel who had served in the Gurkha regiment in India before Independence, was the lawyer for both AE Services and CIAOU. Over $7 million was paid from AE Services to Colbar investment of which Quattrocchi was the direct beneficiary.

Lindstrom had an entire file on this, having followed the trail to the company’s offices in London as well. CIAOU had the power to influence governments, he said, and worked solely on that basis. When he spoke to this columnist he had all the details that he wanted the Indian investigators to pursue, but that was not to be. Clearly frustrated even then, Lindstrom shared details of the cover up that has taken place, pressure from his own government, non-cooperation of the Indian authorities and the difficulties encountered at every step of this investigation. He has since retired and while two of the main players are still alive — Quattrocchi and Sonia Gandhi — clearly progress on the Bofors case cannot be expected.

The Left could have used the eight years to ensure movement on this case to give teeth to its anti-corruption agenda. The BJP did raise its voice but allowed it to be lost in the ensuing din. There was more about the timing of the reports on the Bofors deal, the why and who did it, and why I wrote it, and very little — actually nothing — about the sensational content that if followed by the investigating authorities here could have cracked the kickbacks controversy bringing the links between middlemen, companies, and influential politicians out into the public domain.

The writer is a senior New Delhi-based journalist