Bhushan, Shourie approach CBI Director for probe in Rafale deal

New Delhi: Lawyer Prashant Bhushan and former Union minister Arun Shourie met CBI Director Alok Verma on Thursday, demanding a probe into alleged corruption in the Rafale aircraft deal and offset contract.

Along with a "detailed" complaint under the Prevention of Corruption Act, Bhushan and Shourie submitted documents buttressing their argument for the need of probe.

Alleging that the offset contract for Rafale aircraft was actually a commission to an Anil Ambani-led Reliance group subsidiary, they asked CBI Director Alok Verma to take government's permission to initiate a probe in accordance with the law.

French company Dassault Aviation, the makers of Rafale, had chosen Reliance Defence as its partner to fulfil offset obligations of the deal. Rejecting allegations of corruption, the government has been maintaining it did not have any role in selection of the offset partner by Dassault.

India had inked an inter-governmental agreement with France in September last year for procurement of 36 Rafale fighter jets at a cost of around Rs 58,000 crore, nearly one-and-a-half years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the proposal during a visit to Paris. The delivery of the jets is scheduled to begin from September 2019.

In the 33-page complaint to the CBI, Bhushan and Shourie claimed that Anil Ambani-led Reliance group had incorporated its own subsidiary Reliance Defence barely a few days before the deal was to be signed in Paris.

Barely two months after the deal was signed, Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP), 2013 was amended, with amendments dealing only with offset conditions, it said.

Evidently, even in August, 2015, when the main procurement contract was yet to be signed, somebody in the government was overly concerned with offsets, it alleged. "The said amendment was thereafter incorporated in DPP, 2016 verbatim, which came into effect on April 1, 2016," it alleged.

Alleging "a scam of Rs 36,000 crore", the complaint claimed that the deal was executed in "improper, dishonest, malafide, and abuse of official position".

It alleged that "no mandatory prerequisites for the deal including IAF Services Head Quarters initiating the procurement process by preparing Services Qualitative Requirements (SQRs), Categorisation Committee recommending the mode of procurement'; Defence Acquisition Council and others were taken".

"The original deal for 126 aircraft was also inclusive of weapons.... Therefore, only the cost of the new weapons could be inflated and was indeed artificially inflated," the complaint alleged.

It alleged if price had been the real concern for the government for discarding the old deal, the government would have considered Eurofighter's offer of July 12, 2014 to reduce its price by a full 20 per cent.