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Friday, Aug 17, 2007
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An embarrassment for Government

Special Correspondent

“Decision not to appeal against verdict in Quattrocchi case was political”

NEW DELHI: The Quattrocchi saga seems never-ending. The Italian businessman, the sole remaining accused in the Bofors pay-offs case, has won freedom again and is safely ensconced in his home in Milan, Italy, after a six-month-long legal battle in Argentina against extradition to India.

After Mr. Quattrocchi’s extradition plea was rejected on “technical grounds,” the CBI had assumed that an “automatic appeal” would be filed in the Supreme Court in Buenos Aires. It was caught unawares when the United Progressive Alliance Government decided not to file one.

Highly placed sources told The Hindu on Thursday that it was “purely a political decision” not to press the appeal. With the monsoon session of Parliament on, the Quattrocchi affair threatens to snowball into a major con troversy and an embarrassment for the Government, which would have to explain why its attempt to extradite Mr. Quattrocchi was “half-hearted” and why it decided not to go in appeal.

The sources said the Government would most probably rely on External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee to make a statement in Parliament since it involved extradition from another country.

Vijay Kumar Malhotra, deputy leader of the BJP in the Lok Sabha, alleged that the External Affairs Ministry, the CBI and other Government departments ‘colluded’ to let the Italian businessman go from Argentina to Italy.

The Argentina episode is reminiscent of the UPA Government’s decision to send a law officer to London in December 2005 to make a request for the release of two bank accounts of Mr. Quattrocchi and his wife Maria, containing €3 million and $1 million respectively. On that occasion, too, the agency was kept in the dark and the two bank accounts were emptied in a matter of days.

CBI refutes report

The CBI has refuted a news portal report that CBI Director Vijay Shankar had said that “BJP leader Arun Jaitley and his [Mr. Shankar’s] predecessors in the agency are to blame for building a weak case against Mr. Quattrocchi.”

It dismissed the report as “imaginary, baseless and perhaps malicious.”

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