Mohali firm's subsidiary with 1 staff routed AgustaWestland kickbacks

CHANDIGARH: A Mohali-based firm's subsidiary in faraway Tunisia with just one employee was used to route kickbacks worth around Rs 160 crore (28 million euros) to Indian government officials, politicians and middlemen in the Rs 3,560 crore AgustaWestland chopper scam. This has been disclosed in the charge sheet that was submitted in a Milan court on April 4.

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AgustaWestland had allegedly signed a contract with IDS Tunisia, which is a subsidiary of IDS Infotech, for delivering software. The orders were shown as designs of the fuselage of AW129 and AW139 chopper models. One of the contract's conditions was a monthly payment of 510,000 euros or Rs 3.14 crore in 2008 irrespective of software orders being billed.

According to the contract, one Kamoun Hedi was made director of IDS Tunisia. The Italian investigators point out that the "Tunisia firm had no other employee" apart from one Garavagalia Attilio, who worked as Hedi's secretary. Hedi later told the investigators that he had nothing to do with IDS Infotech director-cum-owner Pratap Aggarwal and Delhi-based lawyer Gautam Khaitan "except rubber-stamping and sending delivery reports on IDS letterhead to AgustaWestland".
The investigators further point out that when searches were being conducted on April 23, 2012, documents from Hedi showed "he had made payments to the various parties involved".

At the time of the contract between AgustaWestland and IDS, former coal minister Santosh Bagrodia's Chandigarh-based brother Satish was director in IDS. He left the firm in 2013. Satish's son Ashish and Aggarwal too were directors at the time and have continued in that position.

The charge sheet has called the contract mode "peculiar" and disclosed how two subsidiaries were created out of the Mohali firm, first in Tunisia - IDS Tunisia - and then in Chandigarh - Aeromatrix - in 2009 "to remunerate Indian government officials, politicians and middlemen Guido Haschke and Carlos Gerosa".
"In practice, there was a purchase order created for Agusta, then a delivery report was created in favour of IDS Tunisia and then finally a work order was shown from IDS to Aeromatrix. All these orders were inevitably backdated," say the investigation documents.

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The charge sheet also says that though the contract between IDS Tunisia and Agusta was signed on August 3, 2008, the first payment received by IDS Infotech is on August 14, 2007.

"It seems evident that that is the system functions in reverse, starting from the delivery of services to get the order of the same. In fact, the first act of this step should be the order by the purchase of services. But here the bills were generated and then orders were given."