GENEVA, January 16: A top Swedish investigator has said Sonia Gandhi should lead the way and tell India and Sweden what she knows about the Bofors' bribes.``Counter-attack is the best defence - Sonia Gandhi has urged the Government to put all the papers relating to the Bofors case on the table. That's a very good idea. I think she should do the same,'' said StenLindstrom, head of Sweden's National Bureau of Investigation (the Swedish FBI).``The bribes have been traced to her friend and this is not something out of the blue. This is no coincidence,'' he added. The friend in question is Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi.He is the beneficial owner of a Geneva account (No. 254.561.60W) in what was formerly the United Bank of Switzerland. Bribes paid by Bofors landed in this account and Quattrocchi instructed the bank to send the money to an account in Guernsay, Channel Islands. Quattrocchi, first a friend of Sonia Gandhi and later a regular feature in that household, fled from India in 1993 when this newspaper linked him to the bribes.Lindstrom, who led the Swedish investigations into the Bofors scandal in 1987-1988, scrutinised hundreds of documents, interviewed Bofors officials including those who negotiated the contract with India and watched helplessly as his investigation was stopped a few weeks before Rajiv Gandhi visited Sweden in January 1988.``All information we had at that time (when the investigation was stopped) pointed to the Gandhi link - Sonia Gandhi should place her cards on the table,'' Lindstrom told The Indian Express today.Rajiv Gandhi is referred to once by name in the documents now with the Indian Government and in another instance he is simply called R. The Smoking Howitzer is a company called AE Services. On July 2, 1987 Martin Ardbo wrote in his diary that ``Bob has met Gandhi trustee lawyer,'' in Geneva. Ardbo is former Bofors executive who negotiated the contract with India and when caught told Swedish investigators that Bofors would not have got the contract if it had not paid AE Services. Pressed, he said this was the ``political payoff''. Bob is Robert Wilson, the front-end mover of AE Services, the company into which Bofors paid some $ 7 million. That money made its way into Quattrocchi's account. Ardbo was a feverish note-taker. In a note dated 2.8.1987, he said ``consequences for N (Nehru) he didn't care about, but Q (Quattrocchi) was a problem because of his closeness to R (Rajiv).'' Both these entries were made at the height of the cover-up session that passed through Geneva, London, Stockholm and New Delhi. A contractual agreement worth 3 per cent of the deal was imposed on AE Services for a duration and content of services that Bofors did not even bother to explain. The records also show that Bofors signed this agreement in November 1985, six months after the ``no middleman'' requirement by the Government of India. AE Services assured Bofors it would have the contract before the end of March 1986 failing which it need not be paid. The contract between India and Bofors was signed on March 24, 1986, just in time! Ardbo told Swedish investigators he could never reveal what this company was all about and that information would be buried with him. In June 1987, the Swedish National Audit Bureau (SNAB) which conducted an independent inquiry into the pay-offs concluded that bribes had been paid. But the report it sent to India had the crucial references to the bribes blanked out. Gandhi read the blanks and announced to the nation that the SNAB report had placated his stand that no bribes had been made. In autumn 1987, Bofors offered to send a team to India with the names of the recipients. Per Ove Morberg, senior vice-president of the company, and Lars Gothlin, the legal counsel, were to travel to New Delhi with the names. They wanted to give out the names of the bribe-takers to a small group of Indian officials, but preferably only to the Prime Minister. Rajiv Gandhi cancelled that trip the last minute. He later said he did not want to be the only person to know the names as that could lead to misunderstanding. A small coterie around Rajiv Gandhi that included Gopia Arora, NN Vohra, SK Bhatnagar, to name a few, met Bofors officials secretly for a session in September 1987 in what was a clear attempt to coach the Swedes about how to depose before the JPC. They even invited the Swedes to tell them privately anything they could not to a larger gathering that was the JPC. When the JPC published its white-wash, Rajiv claimed he was vindicated. From April to September 1988, massive leaks of authenticated documents showed how the bribes had been paid, to whom, where and under what circumstances. Gandhi said they were ``papers'' of doubtful origins. But in fact, the CBI had authenticated the documents and then kept quiet. Rajiv never called for a genuine investigation into the bribes. He, however, said in Parliament, completely unprovoked, that neither he nor any member of his family was involved. When Lindstromand his team sought assistance from India, they were told to mind their own business. The Rajiv Government never launched any investigation in Switzerland where the bribes landed. It said the Swiss were uncooperative. That was a lie because the Swiss froze the concerned accounts within 24 hours of a genuine request from India sent by the VP Singh Government. In February 1992, India's former Foreign Minister Madhavsinh Solanki carried a letter to his Swiss counterpart Rene Felber asking him to stop the Bofors investigations. The letter, unsigned and undated had come from the Prime Minister of India, Solanki had said. PV Narasimha Rao was the Prime Minister then. In an interview, General K Sundarji recalled what Gandhi's friend and Sundarji's chief Arun Singh told him just before he retired. ``He said he was pretty upset about what he saw as a fairly massive cover-up plan.they are preparing to do all this, they are preparing to do all this just to save the skin of one man,'' Sundarji said, quoting Singh.There's more, much more, just waiting to be discovered in Sweden, Switzerland and India.
