So, how did you young men get into this mess?’’ My somewhat patronising question to the dramatis personae of the Volcker drama, whom I have spent long hours quizzing, was actually a spontaneous one. And a desperate attempt to disarm them into switching to confessional mode and talking, at least, about the leads they have been confronted with during interrogation sessions in the Enforcement Directorate Headquarters in Loknayak Bhawan. Five weeks into the revelations of the Indian beneficiaries of the oil-for-food scandal and, one by one, members of a clique of fledgeling commodity traders — all with Congress party connections — have received the dreaded summons. There is Andaleeb Sehgal, who has now made a habit of carrying his lunch box to the ED office. There are his Hamdan colleagues/parters, Vikas Dhar and Asad Khan. And there is Jamil Ajmal Saidi, a pointman for aspiring traders to Baghdad who Sehgal says was introduced to him by Khan. They are actually a smart, urbanite, upward mobile lot, who were in the process of setting up swank offices and diversifying from trade in commodities like rice and tea to more serious stuff like surveillance equipment and hardware. That is when the Volcker scam broke and took in its sweep the scalp of as senior a dignitary as the country’s foreign minister — making the current investigations being conducted inside the decrepit headquarters of the ED a subject of intense media scrutiny and necessitating monitoring of the Volcker probe at the level of Finance Minister P. Chidambaram himself. The ED is actually a moribund, neglected government outfit, which despite having been chosen as the agency to monitor the recently introduced Money Laundering Bill has not got the kind of upgradation or infrastructure, say, the spanking new Serious Frauds Wing of the Ministry of Commerce has got. In fact, till the ED was declared out-of-bounds for the media, thanks to the Volcker probe, visitors could breeze through an unmanned reception desk without even a token entry in a register. Now, in the FEMA regime, ED officials have spent weeks turning hard disks, account books, bank transactions, telephone records and tax returns of Andaleeb Sehgal and his associates upside down. Investigations by the Income Tax Department are simultaneously in progress in their Jhandewalan office. And in the case of prime suspect Andaleeb Sehgal — who is alleged to have deposited the illegal surcharge amounting to Rs 3.3 crore in four installments into a Jordan bank in 2001 — even his prospective business associates have been interrogated or contacted. There is Congress MLA Arvind Khanna who has been spared a summons, but whose staff has been questioned since correspondence between his firm, Dynamic Sales, and Hamdan Exports was located in Andaleeb’s files. A British Company, named 2020, with which Hamdan was negotiating for setting up office security systems has been contacted in London. The stage has been set for Jagat Singh — who accompanied Andaleeb to Jordan — to be sent a summons by the ED but the agency may wait till they have all the facts on the interrogation table. Thus, with every passing day, the scope of ED investigations is getting wider but even as ED Chief Sudhir Nath is on his second foreign foray — this time to Baghdad and Jordan — the question befuddling the media and political observers is: is the ED on a definite money trail into the Iraqi pay-offs? Or will the Volcker scandal end up like Bofors where big bucks were spent by the investigating agencies probing shell companies in an inconclusive probe? Obviously, given the manpower and time being spent by the ED on the probe, every lead, every telephone number is being put under the scanner. While Volcker has handed over one set of attested documents on the non-contractual beneficiaries to special envoy Virendra Dayal and Sudhir Nath in New York, a second, more voluminous set — which is likely to contain details of contracts of the supply of humanitarian goods by Indian entities to Iraq — is soon to be handed over. Andaleeb, incidentally, says he went to Iraq to pitch for some of these contracts but Hamdan was not among the chosen companies. And Saidi concedes that he acted as a consultant for several large corporates which exported goods under the UN-backed programme but claims the deals were absolutely legitimate. While in Baghdad, Indian sleuths will evidently be approaching the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation (SOMO) for getting original copies of the contracts and put in a formal request for getting details of the bank accounts into which the surcharges were paid in Jordan. The results of Dayal-Enforcement Directorate probe will then be handed over to the Justice Pathak Commission. But given the Indian experience with inquiry commissions and the fact that right now the Central Bureau of Investigation is struggling with findings of two such commissions — the Jain Commission which probed Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and the Phukan Commission which went into the Tehelka deals — the Volcker probe may end up in an endless diplomatic paper chase which the Bofors scandal informed us almost two decades ago was called Letter Rogatory.
