Heavyweight Hinduja brothers get their Bofors call from CBI

NEW DELHI, JANUARY 13: The crucial final link in the Bofors payoffs seems to be falling in place with the Hinduja brothers being asked to ...

NEW DELHI, JANUARY 13: The crucial final link in the Bofors payoffs seems to be falling in place with the Hinduja brothers being asked to “join” investigations into the 13-year bribery case. Yesterday, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sent notices to Gopichand Hinduja, Srichand Hinduja and Prakash Hinduja through Indian missions in Geneva and London. The Hindujas, who have consistently denied any irregularities, have been given a week to respond.

The CBI’s move comes as it is scrutinising the final set of documents received from Berne on December 19 and is working on its second chargesheet. The first chargesheet, naming Rajiv Gandhi, Ottavio Quattrocchi and Win Chadha, was filed on October 22.

The CBI’s notice is meant to explore the “link” of the powerful non-resident Indian brothers to the final stream of Pitco-Moresco-Moineao payments totalling Rs 16 crore (SEK 81 million). The CBI notices also assume significance given that the Hindujas’ clout has been widely debated.

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The Hindujas begantheir shadowy intervention way back in 1990 when the CBI filed its first information report in the case and asked the Swiss Government to freeze the six accounts into which payments totalling Rs 64 crore were made. The Swiss accepted the request and the first batch of secret documents arrived that very year.

The Hindujas spent an entire decade trying to block the transfer of the final set of bank documents to India and played out a final courtroom drama last year when they invoked the “Swiss mutual assistance on criminal matters” (called IMAC), implying that the bank documents might be misused for purposes other than criminal investigations by the Indian agencies. That last-ditch effort also failed and the CBI was called last month to collect the papers on the Pitco-Moresco-Moineao payments.

Though the Hindujas have been assiduously denying any link to the Bofors scam, in the first Bofors chargesheet, the CBI had said that it was “continuing investigations” against Gopichand Hinduja, Srichand Hindujaand Prakash Hinduja. Subsequently, Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani hinted that if need be, the CBI would chargesheet the Hindujas.

Sources in the CBI say that the second chargesheet would clarify who the recipients of the Pitco-Moresco-Moineao payments were and whether the money laundering trail of the third stream of payments led to another tax haven as the case of payments made to Svenska (to Win Chadha) and AE Services (made to Quattrocchi).

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More