The CBI will withdraw on Saturday cases pending before a Delhi court against Ottavio Quattrocchi relating to the Bofors gun deal, Law Minister M Veerappa Moily said today, setting the stage for legal burial of over two-decade old lawsuits against the Italian businessman.
“The government has taken a decision for withdrawal of the cases and the public prosecutor, on behalf of the CBI, will move an application before a magistrate’s court in Delhi on October 3,” Moily said. The minister said there was no point in pursuing the matter which had “damaged the lives of so many people”. “Still you want to hunt the shadow,” he said adding “we cannot keep it going just for the false prestige of the government or just to oblige the Opposition which wants to keep it alive”.
Hitting back at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for criticising the decision to drop the cases, he said that the party was in power at the Centre for eight years but had failed to make any headway.
Quattrocchi, 69, is the sole accused in the cases after the Delhi High Court on May 31, 2005, quashed charges against other accused. He has not appeared before Indian courts. The government has submitted before the Supreme Court that all efforts to extradite Quattrocchi, an accused in the cases relating to payment of Rs 64 crore as commission in the Swedish Howitzer deal, have failed.
The CBI decided to close the case by also taking into account the Delhi High Court judgement which had held that no case of corruption was made out in the Bofors deal.
Moily, who is here at the invitation of the British government, said that since a public interest litigation was pending before the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General thought it fit that all aspects should be brought to the notice of the apex Court.
More From This Section
Moily, himself an eminent lawyer, noted that Justice J D Kapoor, Judge of the Delhi High Court on February 4, 2004, had quashed all charges under the Prevention of Corruption Act and bribery in the Bofors case.
The judgment exonerated the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and S K Bhatnagar, the Defence Secretary during the period.
Judge Kapoor had observed that the charges were "framed purely on the basis of irrelevant inferences, presumptions, surmises, conjectures and through riotous imagination by even introducing personal knowledge of facts which were not set up by the CBI little realizing that criminal trials cannot proceed nor can succeed on such premises without there being any material or evidence corroborating those inferences."
Moily said," if there is some evidence to pursue, we would not have hesitated to do so. But there is no point in pursuing the matter now". "When there is no case under the Prevention of Corruption Act, where is the question of criminality involved ?" he asked.