The CBI has registered an FIR against Fernandes, Jaya Jaitley and Admiral Sushil Kumar for irregularities in purchasing the Barak missile system.
Josy Joseph & Brajesh Kumar
NEW DELHI: The CBI has accused former defence minister George Fernandes of misleading the Cabinet to facilitate the contract to procure Barak anti-missile systems from Israel in 2000.
The agency also accused Fernandes’s associate, Jaya Jaitly, of accepting a bribe of Rs2 crore for the deal. The agency’s FIR, which was filed on Tuesday, also charges then navy chief Admiral Sushil Kumar with committing irregularities to expedite the contract.
The CBI raided the premises of six major arms dealers across the country as it stepped up its investigation into major defence deals. The raids yielded a number of incriminating documents and vast sums of unaccounted money.
The operation was meant to gather evidence of the dealers’ involvement in the purchase of the Barak system, armoured recovery vehicles, Denel guns from South Africa, and Krasnopol guided munitions.
In a statement, the CBI said Jaitly was functioning “from the residence of the then RM (Raksha Mantri)” and that RK Jain, national treasurer of the Samata Party, was paid “several lakhs of rupees” for the Barak deal.
It said Fernandes overruled, at a middleman’s behest, the opinion of the Defence Research and Development Organisation, which was developing the indigenous Trishul system.
The CBI said the “then chief of naval staff colluded with other accused persons and put up a note directly” to the minister to import six Barak systems. It charged Kumar with “misrepresenting facts and citing a DRDO concurrence given three years earlier when the indigenous Trishul system was in its initial stages of development”.
The CBI said Kumar had discussed Barak’s acquisition that “very day with the then DRDO chief, who had opposed the proposal”. President APJ Abdul Kalam was the DRDO chief then.
Fernandes, according to the CBI, not only approved the proposal to import the Barak system but tried to get it approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security despite the objection raised by the defence secretary.
The CBI said the contract was processed on a single-tender basis, and the “negotiated note of US $268.63 million (Rs1125 crore) was also in excess of the earlier quoted rate by US $17 million (about Rs71 crore), for which there is no proper justification.”
The agency said prima facie evidence indicates receipts of remittances from abroad from the Israeli company or firms connected with it into the accounts of the middleman named earlier and two others.
The CBI raided 50 places in Delhi, Gurgaon, Sangroor in Punjab, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Pune.
Among those raided were the Khannas — Vipin, Aditya, and Arvind, the Congress MLA from Sangrur — who also figured in the investigation against former external affairs minister Natwar Singh in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal.
A CBI source said the Khannas were the middlemen for the deal to buy anti-material rifles from Denel. The government froze all deals with Denel last year after reports appeared in South Africa of bribes being paid in the deal.
A CBI source said two arms dealers raided today — Sudhir Chowdhury and Suresh Nanda, son of Admiral SM Nanda, who was the navy chief during the 1971 war — were involved in the Barak purchase.
The agency raided MS Sahani, another arms dealer, for his alleged involvement in the deal relating to the purchase of Krasnopol terminally guided munitions.
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