French investigative journal Mediapart on Monday alleged fake invoices raised by Dassault Aviation, a French company, to pay at least Euro 7.5 million in kickbacks to an Indian middleman to help it secure the Rs 59,000-crore deal with India for 36 Rafale fighter jets.
It identified the middleman as Sushen Gupta and claimed Dassault made the bulk of payments before 2013. It claimed the spreadsheets of Sushen Gupta showed that Dassault, which he dubbed as D, paid Euro 14.6 million to Interstellar Technologies in Singapore over the period of 2004 to 2013.
The journal said Interstellar Technologies was a shell company with no real activity and administered by a straw man for the Gupta family. In another report in April, it had claimed that Dassault paid Euro 1 million to Gupta to produce 50 large replica models of Rafale jets.
The kickbacks of Euro 7.5 million are equal to Rs 65 crore. The journal claimed the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had evidence of the bribes given to Sushen Gupta since October 2018, and said the CBI decided not to probe the evidence.
Both the agencies also have probed corruption by Gupta in the Agusta Westland deal by the previous UPA government for the VVIP helicopters, and that Gupta is not a new face for them. Gupta is accused of taking bribe from Agusta through a shell company registered in Mauritius.
The Mauritius administration had forwarded the Agusta documents to the CBI on October 11, 2018, exactly a week after getting a complaint of alleged corruption in the Rafale deal. Mediapart says the CBI decided not to probe the complaint filed on October 4, 2018 throwing light on the middleman's suspicious activities in 2015, the year when the deal was finalised in the presence of Prime Minister Modi.
India’s decision to sign an $8.7 billion government-to-government deal with France to buy 36 Rafale warplanes made by Dassault was announced in April 2015, with an agreement signed a little over a year later. This replaced the previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s decision to buy 126 Rafale aircraft, 108 of which were to be made in India by the state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL).
The deal became controversial as the opposition, led by the Congress, claimed that the price at which India was buying Rafale aircraft now is Rs 1,670 crore for each plane, three times the initial bid of Rs 526 crore by the company when the UPA was trying to buy the aircraft. It also claimed the previous deal included a technology transfer agreement with HAL.
