Newsmaker: Ottavio Quattrocchi

Wanted!

Eighteen months before the next general election, Bofors has returned to haunt the Gandhi family. The story for those Indians who may have been living in Uranus and therefore may not have followed the Bofors saga, is simple.

India negotiated to buy a kind of gun that was manufactured by Swedish firm, AB Bofors. A commission was paid. This is customary. Who got the commission ? And how was it routed? It is this tortuous truth that India has been struggling to get at from the late 1980s when the story first broke of commissions being paid in the Bofors gun deal.

To cut a very long story short, there were three sets of people Bofors paid to secure the contract. One was their former agent in India, Win Chadha (Rs 38 crore).

The other was the London-based Hindujas (Rs 16 crore), allegedly into the Pitco-Moresco-Moineao accounts said to be controlled by them (they contested this in Indian courts and won the case). The third (Rs 10 crore) was the UK-based AE Services.

The legal route to Win Chadha and the Hindujas has been exhausted. But AE Services continue to puzzle Indian investigating agencies. Who are they?

In 1992 Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter quoted a top Bofors official as indicating that "the money went to Rajiv through... AE Services. Without them Bofors couldn't have got the order."

India had petitioned Swiss courts to release bank documents because, if it couldn't get Bofors to say who its agents were, it could follow the money to them.

But in 1993, six days after Interpol alerted the authorities in India of a startling discovery "" that among those appealing against the transfer of incriminating Swiss bank documents was one Ottavio Quattrocchi "" the Man from Milano and his wife vanished from India and have not returned since.

Quatrocchhi came to India in 1968 as the representative of firm Snamprogetti. He was said to represent the firm rival to Bofors "" Sofma "" but switched sides later. He was said to be a close friend of the Gandhi family, he was quoted in interviews as having said their children had played together...

But how could it be proved that AE Services and Quattrocchi had a relationship? Look at the Swiss Cantonal court records.

The order in 1996 says: "Colbar Investments and Quattrocchi seem to have received an amount issuing from commissions paid by Bofors and one cannot therefore say that their appearance in the case was the proceed of pure chance, especially that according to the overt confession of the appellants it appears that Quattrocchi had relationships in India at the highest level..."

Colbar Investments was a shell company of which Quattrocchi was the "economical owner". That transferred money to a series of shell companies ending finally in the Guernsay Islands "" money that had originated from...? Right, AE Services.

It is this Ottavio Quattrocchi for whom the hunt is on now. He is said to have lodged some money in a London bank. The account was mysteriously un-frozen earlier this year and the money vanished.

When the NDA was in power, foreign minister Jaswant Singh got Quatrocchi in Malaysia and tried to prod the CBI into getting him extradited. But he had committed no crime in that country and was let off.

The question is: Who introduced Ottavio Quattrocchi to Bofors officials and why? What services did his company AE Services offer? Who is the "Q" referred to by Bofors chief Martin Ardbo in his diaries? And who is the "R"?