Power centers in the corridors of power, Extra Con

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Bofors truth points to Quattrocchi, Sonia

By Sten Lindstrom

Principal Swedish investigator says interrogating Sonia Gandhi, Ottavio Quattrocchi and Martin Ardbo will lead to answers in the Bofors case

My name is Sten Lindstrom. I am a Swedish police officer. I was the principal investigator in the Bofors-India Howitzer case. I don’t know why I use the past tense — the investigation is not over. It probably will never be. And that is because people in Sweden and India want it that way. This is not the Sweden of my dreams. And I suspect there are many in India who will be able to hear what I am trying to say.

Police officers are human beings. When we take an oath of office, we pledge to serve our office to the best of our ability, to defend the principles upon which our nations are built. However difficult that task and however dangerous be our work, we are expected to soldier on.

Almost 18 years after the Bofors case was handed over to me for investigation, I remain convinced that the truth about what happened in India and Sweden will surface one day. It always does. Whether I can help or not, whether those in India and Sweden who covered up in the Bofors case want it or not, one day we will know the truth. Whether we have the courage to face it and put in corrective measures is another matter. But truth has a nasty habit of surfacing when we least expect it to.

As a police officer, I know that patience and perseverance are good bets. Police officers will tell you that in any investigation, very soon we get a good idea of the nature of the crime, its scope and depth. Indeed, all the pieces do not fall into place in any given sequence or pattern. Often, the wait is long.

Over the years we get trained to learn a lot not so much by what is told, shown, and led to believe. We get a good idea of what is going on by what is denied, what is covered up and what we are not told. This can be information that is denied in the form of witnesses who do not speak, this can be access that is blocked because famous and powerful interests are threatened and this can come in the form of delays and hindrance to our mandate to continue the investigations without fear or favour.

And this can even come in the form of investigations and inquiries that are designed to go nowhere. The Bofors-India investigation scored on all these counts.

The Bofors case told itself. And it will continue to do so. By making my work difficult at every twist and turn, by hiding what I was looking for, by offering me irrelevant information and by continuing, even today, to pretend to look for the culprits, the Bofors story continues to tell itself. For example, pressure from India resulted in the closing down of an investigation by the Swedish prosecutor.

Pressure from India also led to the Swedish National Audit Bureau sending a blanked out version of its inquiry to India. All the relevant parts containing the critical payment details were blacked out. I had the full report and it was unreal to see politicians claim that no payments had been made on the basis of an incomplete report.

There were other problems. When a team of senior executives from Bofors travelled to India to testify before the Joint Parliamentary Committee, they were prevented from doing so. Instead they met a small group of officials to whom they did not hand over any names. We were told this was because even if the Swedes had given the names, no one would have believed them. I know this did not make sense to a lot of people, but for a police officer this meant that my worst fears were probably true.

I said earlier that the truth will come out one day. I do not believe that day is far. The unravelling continues. Ottavio Quattrocchi, the Italian middleman who negotiated the political payoff through A E Services, must be interrogated. Sonia Gandhi must be questioned. All else is detail.

Key questions need answers. Among them:

* Who introduced Ottavio Quattrocchi to Bofors officials?



* What was Ottavio Quattrocchi’s value proposition that led him to assure Bofors contractually that he need not be paid if the deal was not closed in their favour?

* Why did Bofors pay Ottavio Quattrocchi?

* What services did his company A E Services offer?

* What are the links between Ottavio Quattrocchi and Sonia Gandhi?

* Who is the Gandhi trustee lawyer that Martin Ardbo met in Geneva?

I raised these questions with Martin Ardbo, the key Bofors negotiator who told me, as he did to a few others, that the truth about the India payoffs would follow him to his grave. He was especially quiet about the last-minute contract with AE Services, a deal that he personally oversaw.

It was clear to me that this was the political pay-off. Police officers know that the person who comes in last and walks off with a sum of money for no apparent work is a political payment made to people who have the power to close the deal.

This amount is typically calculated only after all the major stages of negotiations and the price structure are complete. This was A E Service’s profile and it received a single payment of 50 million Swedish kronor routed through Swiss banks. This money moved very fast to avoid detection.

Quattrocchi was directly linked to this account. It was in connection with this very secret negotiation that Ardbo wrote of a meeting in Geneva between the front-end mover of the account (Bob Wilson) and a Gandhi trustee lawyer in Geneva. This meeting took place on July 2, 1987. Ardbo was very worried about what I knew about this deal.

He was surely worried about people discovering who ‘Q’ was and what his links to ‘R’ were as he noted: ‘Q’ for Quattrocchi and ‘R’ for Rajiv Gandhi. I am being made a scapegoat to protect big people, he told us.

There were other tell-tale marks. In crimes that involve political payoffs, no one has the full story. Players come in, perform their job and leave. This is done to ensure that should there be a problem, there is a built-in firewall against information landing in wrong hands, i.e. they proceed on a need-to-know basis.

In the Bofors-India case too, this was true. The only person who probably has all the pieces of this jigsaw is Martin Ardbo. And he wrote his fears down on paper. I had contact with him recently and he still keeps his secrets to himself.

In sharp contrast Indian politicians involved in the corruption issued denials, sent notes, dispatched officials and created confusion where none was necessary. Police officers will tell you that this is an old tactic to muddy the waters.

When the protest is louder and longer than the accusation, you can be sure the guilty are speaking. The then Prime Minister (Rajiv Gandhi) told the Indian Parliament that neither he nor any member of his family was involved in the payoffs.

That, I believe, was his first big mistake; one that gave us many clues. What he did not know then was that the Swedish government was examining a lot of documents even as he was speaking. The evidence in the documents documenting the bribes, including a last-minute payoff to Ottavio Quattrocchi’s AE Services, Martin Ardbo’s silence and Rajiv Gandhi’s denials in the Indian Parliament, were all happening at the same time as far as my work was concerned.

The Gandhi name and the link to Quattrocchi were now part of the investigation. This did not mean that the case was politicised. It only meant that there was a critical political dimension to this, not dissimilar to cases of this magnitude. I am probably the only person who has met every Swedish official connected with the Bofors-India case.

From its former head Martin Ardbo to former Swedish foreign minister Sten Anderson, from people in Bofors’ accounts department to its board members. It would not be wrong to say that I am probably one of no more than a handful of people, if not the only person, to have seen all the documents pertaining to the Bofors-India case. Sonia Gandhi must be questioned.I know what I am saying.





Quattrocchi took $7,123,000


Stockholm, April 7: Sweden’s Economic Crimes Bureau received definite information in 1997, six years after the Bofors case was officially closed, that Ottavio Quattrocchi was one of the recipients of the kickbacks that are still haunting the Gandhi family. An Interpol message confirmed what the Swedish investigating team had known for several years, that a percentage of the money paid for the Howitzer deal went “as a gift” to Quattrocchi now in Italy.

Principal investigating officer Sten Lindstrom, who has spent 17 years on the case and like the archetypal policeman is not prepared to let it go until justice is done, said that Interpol had confirmed “what we had known but were not able to prove with conclusive evidence.”

In his first-ever interview to an Indian newspaper the detective superintendent of the Swedish Economic Crimes Bureau said that the new information clearly establishes that $7,123,000 was paid by A.E. Services between 16-29 September 1986 to Colbar Investment Ltd. Quattrocchi, he said, held the power of attorney for this company.

Lindstrom was almost certain that this money, a fraction of the total amount paid by Bofors for the deal to Indian middlemen and various companies, was intended as a “gift” for Quattrocchi from his influential “friends” in India for other services rendered. He said that two facts prompted him to make this assessment.

One, that in 1988, Colbar Investment Ltd Inc transferred a substantial amount of money to its subsidiary Wetelsen Oversea SA, Panama, and further on to Ansbacher Ltd, Guernsey. He said the exact amount could not be ascertained at the time. Two, he said the sum transferred to Quattrocchi’s concern did not appear to be intended for Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi as it was too small an amount. “I think they intended it as a gift for Quattrocchi,” Lindstrom said, pointing out that the Italian businessman was a sudden entry as he was not mentioned by Bofors officials at any time, even in passing, during the investigation.

Lindstrom said that when the investigation closed in 1991 the Economic Crimes Bureau had information that $7,343,942 was transferred by Bofors AB to AE Services on September 8, 1986. Of this, the said amount was paid to Colbar Investment Ltd Inc. Interestingly, the parent company of AE Services, according to Lindstrom, was CIAOU Anstalt, with lawyer Robert Wilson holding the power of attorney.

Wilson had served in India as a General of a Gurkha regiment, and was interviewed by Lindstrom. CIAOU — Wilson himself told the Swedish investigator — reads Ciao (Italian for hello) without the U. It stands for Consortium Information Assimilation Output Unit. CIAOU, Lindstrom said, acted as an agency for channelling funds for defence manufacturers and added that Wilson had told him that it had considerable influence with governments.

Lindstrom said that he was certain that there was some connection between CIAOU and Quattrocchi. He said that he had not been able to work on this as the details about Quattrocchi had come too late and it was impossible under Swedish law to open the case. He said that according to Interpol the Indian government has the documents to prove Quattrocchi’s involvement in the entire deal and that if he had known at the time he would have certainly questioned the Italian businessman who, incidentally, started his career as an agent for Italian companies in India.

It is important here to establish that Lindstrom is perhaps one of the handful of Swedish personnel who, apart from being involved in the Bofors investigation from day one, has seen almost every document to do with the case. This correspondent spoke to him extensively, the interviews spanning seven long hours of intense discussion. In February 1986, as part of the national investigation team, he was assigned to work out the murder of Prime Minister Olaf Palme.

Swedish Radio broke the Bofors story in April 1987 and in August the same year he joined chief prosecutor Ringberg and two other police officers to investigate the case. It was a long and arduous journey, undertaken with great enthusiasm by the team that was confident of cracking the case. Lindstrom said that they carried out detailed interviews, made house searches, collected documents until they reached the “wall” in Switzerland, where the Swiss refused to part with details of the bank accounts.

He said that they were able to establish that money had been paid by Bofors AB, ascertain details about the recipients but for a variety of reasons that will be written about in these columns later, were unable to obtain conclusive evidence to pin down the guilty.

Lindstrom said that 320 million Swedish kronor had been paid to the Hindujas and Win Chadha, as against the substantially smaller amount delivered to AE Services and through it to Quattrocchi. Lindstrom said that there were two ways of cracking a case. One was by obtaining sufficient evidence to take the guilty to court.

The other was to know the truth but not have conclusive evidence to establish it in the eyes of the law. He said the Bofors case fell into the second category: “we know what the truth is, but we were unable to establish it.” He was sure, however, that “it will all come out” one day. “It has taken a long time, it might take more time but one day the truth about this case will be known.”