New Rafale Allegation: Report Says CBI Refused to Investigate Bribes in Rafale Deal

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India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

| Posted: Monday November 8th, 2021 03:07 PM [IST]

New Delhi, November 08: A French online newspaper Mediapart claimed that the CBI had decided not to investigate alleged bribes paid under the Rafale deal.

The bribe documents were sent to the CBI on October 11, 2018, a week after the agency received a formal complaint. “However, the CBI has decided not to open an investigation, even though only seven days after the filing of this corruption complaint, it received information proving that secret commissions had indeed been paid,” according to the report.

New evidence of bribes in Rafale deal appears in French journal Mediapart

The report claimed that fake invoices allowed French aircraft manufacturer Dassault Aviation to pay at least 7.5 million euros to middlemen in a bid to help it secure a 59,000 crore rupee deal with India for 36 Rafael fighter planes.

“These are offshore companies, questionable contracts and ‘fake’ invoices. Mediapart can reveal that detectives from the Indian Federal Police, the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) and colleagues from the Enforcement Directorate (ED) , which fights against money laundering, have had proof since October 2018 that Dassault has paid at least 7.5 million euros in secret commissions to the intermediary Sushen Gupta, ”the report said.

In April 2021, the same newspaper claimed to be in possession of documents showing that Dassault and its industrial partner, Thales, had paid Gupta several million euros in secret commissions as part of the Rafael agreement.

The April report said the bulk of the payments were made before 2013. “According to an accounting spreadsheet owned by Sushen Gupta, an entity called simply ‘D’, which is a code he regularly used to denote Dassault , paid 14.6 million euros to Interdev in Singapore over the period 2004-2013 “, he added.

(The documents cited by Mediapart have not been reviewed by OneIndia)

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Article first published: Monday, November 8, 2021, 3:07 p.m. [IST]

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