Joginder Singh not in favour of giving legal burial to Bofors case

A former CBI director, who had brought to India documents relating to the Bofors pay-off case, today did not favour the agency seeking its legal burial saying it is a "legally sound case" to show there was corruption.

"Documents are there to show that he (Ottavio Quattrocchi) received money", said Joginder Singh during whose tenure the documents were brought to the country. Singh was CBI's director during 1996-97.
    
"It is a legally sound case documents were brought and submitted to the government and to the courts in the country," he said when asked about CBI seeking a legal burial to the case. Singh also said a decision to withdraw the two-decade old case against Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi is taken by the government and not by the CBI.
   
"It is not the CBI but it's the government's decision because it is the government's advocate who has said this...you can put all the blame on CBI because he (the advocate) is representing a CBI case," he added.
    
"It is the government which decides whether to go in for an appeal in a particular case from lower case to the high court and from the high court to the supreme court," he added. If the government says there is no case it means that the CBI says there is no case, he said. Singh said that "no one has gone behind that who and why the legal opinion for seeking the withdrawal of the case against Italian businessman was given?"

On the flak that the premier investigating agency of the country was receiving in the two-decade-old case, Singh said, "It is not CBI's case and no one (in CBI) will talk about it for the simple reason that they are bound by the conduct rules.

"After all, the CBI functions as per the law in the country and the attorney general is the highest authority to decide," he said. The former CBI director also rued that the agency even does not have the independence of hiring an advocate on its own or pay fees to him.

The CBI on Saturday sought legal burial of the 20-year-old Bofors pay-off case against Quattrocchi by moving for its withdrawal before a Delhi court which refused to pass
any immediate order.

CBI sought withdrawal of the case against the 69-year-old Italian businessman on the ground that "continuance of his prosecution will be unjustified".