Sonia’s sound and fury hides vital facts in Bofors payoff case

GENEVA, Feb 14: The two main contestants in the election campaign, Sonia Gandhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee, have been trading charges over Bofors creating confusion in the public as to what is the correct version.

Yesterday, Sonia Gandhi, in her rally at the capital’s Ramlila Maidan, dubbed Vajpayee a liar. BJP leaders had quoted from a New York-based news agency which had released a report saying that the Swedish Prime Minister’s office had asked her to come out with whatever information she had on Bofors. While the Congress has clarified that the Swedish Prime Minister’s office has denied making such a remark, Sonia has chosen to ignore a genuine statement on similar lines made by Sten Lindstrom, head of the Swedish National Bureau of Investigation, (the equivalent of Sweden’s FBI) to The Indian Express urging her to disclose what she knew about the payoffs in the 1986 arms purchase deal.

Lindstrom, who heads Sweden’s highest investigating agency, is most qualified to speak on the subject since he wasthe man who was in charge of the police inquiry into the Bofors India case in 1987-88. In an interview to this newspaper, Lindstrom reacting to Sonia Gandhi’s call to the country to make the Bofors papers public, remarked sceptically that Sonia should do the same and tell the public what she knew about the payoffs as well as the role of Ottavio Quattrocchi, known to be a close family friend. He felt it was no coincidence that the payments had been made to Quattrocchi.

Quattrocchi is an account holder in a Swiss bank into which part of the Bofors bribe was paid. These bank documents have been transferred to India and the CBI has named him as among those who received bribes from Bofors.