Will The Taint Stick On Sonia?

One note purportedly naming people to be managed in India. Is that all it takes to bring a bribe charge home?

- Meetu Jain

It was in a room in a secluded wing on the first floor of the Claridges Hotel in Delhi that Christian Michel James usually stayed. He patronised the hotel not because it belonged to a fellow arms dealer but because, as he claimed, the rooms in that section of the first floor weren’t bugged. that was sometime in 1999, when the Briton was a frequent visitor to New Delhi’s corridors of power, cultivating politicians, bureaucrats and the media. the tall, suave and soft-spoken Michel, now in the eye of the AgustaWestland storm rocking Parliament, was nothing if not cautious.

Mobile phones were the rage then, but Michel knew the perils of using them; he’d communicate on the hotel landline. A decade and half on, records of calls from his hotel room are the subject of intense scrutiny, of both the Enforcement Directorate and the CBI. They throw up a vast repertoire of names, connections and friends Michel had. Investigators confirmed to Outlook that several calls were traced to the Barakhamba Road corporate office of a major Indian defence company in Delhi. The investigation, however, was cut short: sleuths were told not to probe further.

THE MONEY TRAIL

The total contract for supplying 12 helicopters: Rs 3,600 crore

Estimated business development cost (or bribe): Rs 385 crore (about 51 million euros)

Christian Michel and Haschke paid: Rs 226 crore (30 million Euros)

Money parked in Tunisia by Michel and Haschke: Rs 181 crore (about 24 million Euros)

Evidence collected by the CBI of remittances to India: Rs 43 crore (about 5.8 million euros, through firms in Mohali and Chandigarh)