Plea in Bofors scam pending since 2005, advocate urges SC for urgent hearing

He said “the accused persons got kickbacks out of payment towards purchase of Bofors gun, which is hard earned money of poor people of the country”.

“This case has to be decided and guilty be punished so that it would have deterrent effect on society and such type of criminal acts be not repeated in future, like the AgustaWestland, which also occurred with the same modus operandi… with many middlemen and agents,” Agrawal said.

He contended that “had the Bofors scam… not happened, the country would have acquired Sofma Guns manufactured by the French government, which were far better than Bofors”.

According to the advocate, the seniormost officers of the Army, including its Chief of Staff, consecutively for four years in a series of trials and meetings “preferred Sofma over Bofors since it had a better shooting range of 29 kms, while Bofors had only 21 kms”.

“And these were cheaper in cost than Bofors… the handling of Sofma guns was much easier than Bofors guns and the most important point in favour of Sofma as well as for India is that Sofma was transferring its manufacturing technology to India and it was ready to establish a manufacturing unit in India. There would have been no dearth of sophisticated guns and ammunition if the technology would have been transferred to India,” he said.

Agrawal pointed out that the CAG had said that India does not have enough arms to fight if some war occurs and “the ammunition will last for 10 days only”. He said, “No sophisticated guns were purchased after the Bofors because of the mega scam and if Sofma would have been the choice, India might have been exporting the most sophisticated guns manufactured here because of the technology transfer. In Kargil war also casualties of our brave soldiers would have been much less and we would have won the war much earlier since our soldiers need not to go forward, as the shooting range of Sofma was much higher than Bofors… Therefore, the Bofors scam was a much more serious crime, and therefore the guilty should be appropriately punished.”

Giving out the timeline of the case, the plea states, “It shows active collusion of Central government and CBI at every step with all accused, namely Ottavio Quattrocchi, Hindujas and all others.” He added that there is also “an outburst of the Parliamentary Sub-Committee on Defence on the CBI director and secretary, Ministry of Defence, and headlines appeared in newspapers and news channels in 2017”.

Assailing the May 31, 2004 judgment of the HC, quashing the charges, the application said the single judge had altered his own judgment of May 20, 2004 on a recall/clarification application filed by the Hinduja brothers.

“The order is bad in law and lacks jurisdiction..,” it said, adding that the respondents “had got the orders by committing fraud with the Supreme Court and also with Delhi High Court”.

Agrawal said though he had filed an application before the SC on August 5, 2007, for early hearing, the request is yet to be allowed.

The CBI, which had been dragging its feet on filing appeal against the HC order, appealed to the SC in February 2018, but this was disposed of by the court on grounds of delay and also noting that the agency will be heard in his appeal, Agrawal said.