Swiss officials to hand over Bofors papers on Tuesday

The Central Bureau of Investigation will execute a secret plan to bring back to Delhi the Swiss bank documents, relating to kickbacks in the Bofors deal, from the Indian embassy in Berne, Switzerland.

A team of CBI officers is in Berne to make arrangements to transport the documents from the Indian embassy -- to whom the papers will be handed over on Tuesday, January 21 by the Swiss justice ministry -- to the airport and from thereon to Delhi.

CBI Director Joginder Singh will join the team, before the documents are delivered at the embassy.

Nearly seven years have passed since the CBI filed a chargesheet in the case, trying to locate those who had received Rs 640 million as kickbacks in the howitzer deal which the Indian government signed with the Swedish company Bofors AB, a subsidiary of Nobel Industries, in 1986.

The chief of the cantonal police will formally hand over the more than 1,000-page document at 1000 hours local time in the parliament building in Berne at a ceremony presided over by the Indian ambassador in Switzerland. The package contains statements of payments effected by Bofors into five different Swiss bank accounts.

Million in kickbacks were paid into accounts code-named Tulip, Mont Blanc and Lotus in Swiss banks in Geneva and Zurich. The accounts were frozen following the CBI's request in 1990. But not before huge amounts of money from these accounts were spirited away to banks in Liberia and Panama. Undeterred, the CBI asked the Swiss authorities in a letter rogatory to provide information that would help trace where the funds had been transferred to.

The Swiss authorities were put in a quandary by the letter rotagory as it questioned the very basis of that nation's banking system which is based on unflinching secrecy.

Numerous attempts were made by interested parties these past seven years to checkmate the judicial process. Appeals and counter appeals were filed all the way from the respective cantonal courts to the federal supreme court.

The alleged recipients of the kickbacks claimed that many of the documents had been falsified or forged, and the political fallout of the Bofors scandal made it impossible to obtain a fair trial in India.

After two rounds in Switzerland's highest court, India's persistence finally paid off when the court decided to hand over the documents to the Indian government in December 1996.

At the Berne ceremony on Tuesday none of the contents will be referred to or in any way disclosed. The documents will be taken to the CBI headquarters in New Delhi where their eventual utility will be determined.

The issue of culpability need not worry Bofors. In Sweden the public prosecutor gave up its efforts to enquire into the accusations after it transpired that no criminality had been resorted to in Sweden.

In 1987, the Swedish National Audit Bureau, which was assigned the task of investigating the Bofors scandal, worked for a while with the Swiss banks before winding up their enquiry. They recommended that any further enquiry into the transfer of funds be undertaken by the government.

The deal with Bofors involved the sale of 410 howitzers and was drawn up at the highest level in the mid-eighties between Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Olaf Palme of Sweden.

Palme, who was assassinated in 1986, weeks after the deal was signed, had pledged to Rajiv that middlemen would not be used in fulfilling the contract at any level.

A year later, Swedish Radio accused Bofors of having bribed Indian officials in order to win the deal. Since then it has been established that Bofors paid around 319 million Swedish kroner of a proposed 1.4 billion SKR to numbered accounts in Swiss banks.

UNI