Virupaksha wrote:
http://www.greatandhra.com/viewnews.php ... =1&scat=26
interesting that this cartoon made to a telugu gossip site, which has always focused almost exclusively on andhra politics and film gossips.
Band bajega...6:15 SC: Govt changed HEART of coal probe report : The Supreme Court restores transferred probe officer CBI DIG Ravi Kant to head the probe panel. The SC had sought details of the officers of the CBI engaged in investigating coal scam and did not approve of the supervising officer Ravi Kant being allowed to be transferred to the Intelligence Bureau.
The SC also observed that the government was "sharing reports with officials whose departments are under a scanner. The heart of the report was changed on the directions of the government." The court added that there was no substantial progress in the coal scam probe.
17:34 The big five changes the SC wants the CBI to follow : -- The Supreme Court asks the Centre to come out with a law before July 10 to insulate the CBI from external influence and intrusion.
-- The SC also directs the CBI not to share the progress of the probe or any report or material with anybody other than its 33-member team and Director Ranjit Sinha.
-- Immediate steps have to be taken by the Centre and the CBI to repatriate DIG Ravi Kant Mishra who was investigating officer in coal block case and was transferred to the IB.
-- The CBI chief to ensure there is no access to any person, including Law Minister, other Union Ministers, law officers, CBI counsel and Department of Prosecution of the CBI to probe in coal block scam.
-- Status report on the probe in the coalgate scam shall not be provided to the special CBI court where FIR was registered.
-- SC to consider various aspects including setting up of a SIT to look after the probe into coal blocks allocation scam. "Does it not subvert integrity of investigation if changes are brought in status report on suggestion of Law Minister and govt officers," the SC asked.
The CBI says it will follow the directions of the Supreme Court in letter and spirit. The SC will take up the next hearing on July 10 after the four-hour long hearing today.
According to WikiLeaks, the US embassy said that Congress removed Pranab Mukherjee from his post as Minister of Defense because he was not sufficiently zealous in raising funds for the party. “Our sources tell us that Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi and PM Singh needed to get Pranab Mukherjee out of his post as Minister of Defense because he was not sufficiently zealous in raising funds for the party.Mukherjee finally accepted the move after receiving reassurances that he would remain in-charge of the many Ministerial Committees that help him maintain his domestic power base. ”
Subramanian Swamy @Swamy39
I've cracked Coal Gate case: culprits are TKA Nair, Pulok Chatterjee, Ahmed Patel & Motilal Vora. TDK beneficiary. MMS on world tour.
Subramanian Swamy @Swamy39
TDK short listed the coal block recipients after the 4 Chors gave her a list.
Now Mr Antony is the Def min-- > does it mean he is allowing the generation of party funds!!nawabs wrote:WikiLeaks: Pranab was removed as Defence Minister because he could not generate party funds
http://www.niticentral.com/2013/05/09/w ... 75823.htmlAccording to WikiLeaks, the US embassy said that Congress removed Pranab Mukherjee from his post as Minister of Defense because he was not sufficiently zealous in raising funds for the party. “Our sources tell us that Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi and PM Singh needed to get Pranab Mukherjee out of his post as Minister of Defense because he was not sufficiently zealous in raising funds for the party.Mukherjee finally accepted the move after receiving reassurances that he would remain in-charge of the many Ministerial Committees that help him maintain his domestic power base. ”
Did India rush through the controversial flying rights agreement with Abu Dhabi in an effort to placate the emirate that was upset over having to write off its substantial investment in telecom in the country?
A correspondence trail that has come to light indicates that key members of the Indian government were very keen on ensuring that the deal be helped along in any way possible in order that commercial relations with the emirate could be restored.Documents reviewed by Mint suggest that the Indian ambassador to the emirate, in a letter to the civil aviation ministry, had recommended this.
Letters to Sheikh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, managing director of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and a member of the ruling family, from India’s trade minister Anand Sharma and to foreign minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan from India’s external affairs minister Salman Khurshid expressed a desire to engage with the emirate on discussions related to investments in the civil aviation sector.The letters by the ministers were written in early April and that by ambassador M.K. Lokesh on 21 April. India allowed investments in Indian airlines by foreign airlines in September last year.
On 24 April, India allowed Abu Dhabi to increase the number of flights its airline Etihad Airways PJSC operated to and from India.
On the same day, Etihad signed a deal to take a 24% stake in Jet Airways (India) Ltd for $379 million. That deal, which has since turned controversial, is currently winding its way through the regulatory process in India even as several members of Parliament and other politicians have written to the Prime Minister that allowing a foreign airline to take a stake in and management control of an Indian airline is a security threat.
The flying rights agreement has also come under scrutiny with reports that the government rushed it through, and a statement by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) explained the chronology of events that led to an important agreement being cleared in two days. The PMO and the civil aviation ministry have been trying to ensure that accusations of policy measures being rushed through to benefit the companies don’t stick to either of them.
To be sure, ambassadors do write letters of the sort written by the Indian ambassador to Abu Dhabi, pushing the commercial interests of the countries where they are posted, and ministers do respond positively to proposals regarding investments in their country, as Sharma and Khurshid did.
Ambassadors and ministers will seek to push trade and economic ties—that’s their job, said Steve Forte, former chief executive of Jet Airways.“On the one hand the law to allow foreign airlines participation was passed and now someone is getting cold feet,” he said.
Text messages sent to spokespersons of the commerce and external affairs ministries seeking comments on the letters did not elicit any response on Thursday. An email sent to ambassador Lokesh did not receive an immediate reply either.Still, it is clear from the letters that, within the Indian government, the momentum was very much in favour of a deal taking place.
On 15 April, M.K. Lokesh, India’s ambassador to Abu Dhabi, wrote a two-page letter to India’s aviation and external affairs ministries on the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) gripes against India.
“The UAE has recently suffered some setbacks with regard to their investments in India. For instance, they had to write off $1 billion of their investment consequent to cancellation of 2G (telecom) licences. Their investment in the Neyveli power plant is also facing problems on account of dues of over $100 million by the Tamil Nadu government,” according to the letter.
“In this context, the UAE government has hinted that any further investments by their sovereign funds and other entities would be considered only after the conclusion of the BIPPA (bilateral investment promotion and protection agreement),” Lokesh wrote. “In this context, both the external affairs minister and commerce and industry minister had written to the UAE government, assuring them that they would address their concerns expeditiously. They also assured that the UAE demand for additional seats in the civil aviation sector will be considered favorably.”Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) has a corpus of $800 billion to invest, he said.“There is no doubt that some of the recent events, as mentioned above have cast a shadow over further investments from UAE to India,” he said. “In the context of the above, a favourable consideration of the request from the Abu Dhabi authorities for additional capacity allocation for their carrier will go a long way in alleviating their concerns for clearing the way for further investments from UAE to India.” Commerce minister Sharma had already held conversations with Abu Dhabi Investment Authority’s Al Nahyan, before the Ambassador wrote his letter.
On 5 April, Sharma wrote to Al Nahyan about their talks during his visit to UAE in February.
“We had the opportunity for a candid exchange of views and I have taken on board your key concerns on future investments. I can assure you that investments made by UAE under the extant FDI (foreign direct investment) policy will be secure under Indian law,” Sharma said.
“We welcome UAE investments in all sectors of Indian economy including infrastructure and aviation. I recall that you have expressed strong interest in resumption of negotiations on bilateral investment promotion and protection agreement and this matter has engaged serious attention of our government at the highest level, I have taken up both with finance minister (P. Chidambaram) and Prime Minister (Manmohan Singh) and I am confident that we will be able to reach an understanding soon.”
This was followed by a 9 April letter by Khurshid in the week he spoke with the UAE foreign minister.
“I would like to assure you that we are addressing our various pending bilateral issues in accordance with the road map laid down for that purpose,” Khurshid wrote.
Khurshid’s letter indicates that India was hesitant about a country-specific trade protection agreement.
“With specific reference to the India-UAE bilateral investment promotion and protection agreement (BIPPA), I would like to inform you that we are currently in the process of finalizing a universal template for this agreement with a view to best serve the interests of all stakeholders including foreign investors,” Khurshid said. “India would be happy to consider a standalone India-UAE BIPPA pending finalization of the universal template.”
Khurshid added that it was important to maintain investment momentum.
“We believe that we should sustain and nurture the investment momentum including in the aviation sector and let our relations continue to grow at their natural strategic pace for the mutual benefit of our peoples. I understand that our minister of civil aviation will be in touch with his counterpart in due course,” he said.
The air services talks between the two countries were originally scheduled for 23 April.
Ambassador Lokesh wrote to the aviation and commerce ministry on 21 April, two days before the delegation from India was to arrive in Abu Dhabi to start negotiations, about his meeting with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority’s Al Nahyan that day.
The forthcoming talks on aviation “were important in giving them confidence to move ahead on investments in India”, Lokesh said.“It is recommended that the negotiating team should come with positive approach as assured by (the foreign and trade ministers) in their letters...” he wrote. On 22 April, at the direction of the Prime Minister, Chidambaram had called a meeting of Khurshid, Sharma and aviation minister Ajit Singh in the capital on the negotiating team’s mandate for the Abu Dhabi talks. They were allowed to offer up to 40,000 seats, code share agreements and any other terms that would benefit the country, Mint reported on 8 May, based on the minutes of the meeting. The talks couldn’t be concluded on 23 April and spilled over to the next day, when they concluded and the agreement was signed. Only hours before, Etihad and Jet had announced their agreement after four months of talks.
Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy’s letter to the Prime Minister, which raised the security concerns issue, also pointed to the Etisalat as being a contributory factor. It said people “highly placed in your government, have sought by this airlines’ deal to mitigate formal and informal losses suffered by Etisalat and hence UAE”.
Etisalat’s licence was cancelled following a ruling by the Supreme Court in early 2012 that terminated the licences of 122 telcos issued in 2008 in what is now called the 2G scam.
he was just the manager of that account. As we all know the owners are still alive.pandyan wrote:I wonder if he took all the money with him
kmkraoind wrote:
Floating in Twitter.
Full text to eduacte the young ones...Pranav wrote:Chitra Subramaniam on the recently demised Quattrochi -
It is because of who Q was that George Fernandes, India’s Minister of Defence during the NDA regime, told me that he had been told by National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra “not to touch the Bofors file” – because of instructions from former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and deputy Prime Minister LK Advani. It is no secret that Vaypayee and Advani were very accommodating about Q and his friends in New Delhi. How else can one explain why the NDA government, in power from 1998 to 2004, couldn’t arrest Q?
http://www.newslaundry.com/2013/07/the- ... avy-train/
Italian accountant Ottavio Quattrocchi who was paid a bribe of $7.2 million in the 1986 Bofors-India gun deal passed away last weekend. He was no ordinary commission agent operating in India. He was a gravy train close to the Gandhi family. It was common knowledge in New Delhi from the 70s that anyone who was invited to the Quattrocchi home had to wade through strategically placed photos of the Gandhi family. If there was a major negotiation, Q was the signore in the know.
Every Indian politician and political wannabe who met me to “discuss” Bofors (1989 to 2013) cursed Q behind his back and shuddered in his presence. Those who did not shiver like a leaf when his name was mentioned claimed they were using the Q-stick to keep Sonia Gandhi out of power after her husband and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was killed. So, everybody was in the Q game for a personal interest camouflaged as national interest. Everyone thought my political encounter with the movers and shakers of India was because of Bofors.
Bofors was not about Q or R. Bofors was about the self-respect of a nation. It was about institutions in a democracy, the world’s largest. It was about Indians defending India in extreme weather conditions while India slept.
The story is simple. India bought field howitzers from Sweden in 1986 for $1.2 billion dollars. The guns were state of the art, the price competitive. An additional contract ensured that we would manufacture the guns indigenously. Q (as leaked Bofors documents showed) walked into the deal at the 11th hour, asked for a 3% commission payable only when the deal was concluded by a date announced by him through his front company A.E. Services. He walked away a happy man, almost. So why would a Swedish armaments company pay an Italian in India working for Snamprogetti, an engineering arm of the Italian oil and gas firm Eni, for field howitzers?
This is what Amitabha Pande (former joint secretary in-charge of the Bofors contract) posted on Facebook after Q transited.
Q, like Warren Anderson of Union Carbide, was allowed to bolt out of India. It was after I had filed my report linking him directly to the Bofors payments with evidence from Switzerland and Sweden and before the story appeared in print. Q had fled from a major Indian airport because Indians allowed Q to bolt, knowing well that he had cheated Indians. It was in a manner similar to how India had allowed Anderson safe passage, knowing well that he had blood on his hands after the Bhopal gas tragedy.
Packing the punch of Berlusconi and Raja math (in 21st century Italian and Indian political lingo), Q turned entire generations of Indian politicians and bureaucrats and expert lawyers and political commentators into doormats. He was the parrot-green elephant with a yellow trunk and bells on his two hind-feet in a pink room. Andy Warhol at the Thyagaraja music festival in Tanjore (Tamil Nadu) singing Yantaro Mahanubhava, if that helps.
In addition to making a lot of money talking and arguing about him, people individually became prime ministers, governors, ambassadors and collectively let Indian down as they pretended to chase the Sicily-born Q from port to port. Q laughed all the way to the bank, something he had been doing in India for a long time.
Bribes to Q explain why when Swedish state radio reported on July 16, 1986 that Bofors had bribed Indians and others to take clinch the arms deal, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi informed the Lok Sabha at the first opportunity that neither he, nor his family nor his friends had anything to do with the deal.
It is because of who Q was that India has dithered on Bofors for 27 years.
It is because of Q’s importance that in 2009 Indian law minister Hansraj Bharadwaj unblocked Q’s accounts in London so that he could retrieve his bribe – the tax on which was paid by the Indian taxpayer.
It is because of who Q was that the Bofors case was closed in 2011 for want of evidence. It is because of who Q was that Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy said India should apologise to him for hounding an innocent man. A few months later the income-tax department sent him a bill for the bribes.
It is because of who Q was that George Fernandes, India’s Minister of Defence during the NDA regime, told me that he had been told by National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra “not to touch the Bofors file” – because of instructions from former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and deputy Prime Minister LK Advani. It is no secret that Vaypayee and Advani were very accommodating about Q and his friends in New Delhi. How else can one explain why the NDA government, in power from 1998 to 2004, couldn’t arrest Q?
It is because of who Q was that every institution in India from the parliament to the judiciary to the executive was tarred with the same brush.
It was because of who Q was that every head of India’s premier investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) developed half a spine after retirement.
It was because of Q that the CBI sleuths during their several trips to Sweden to get at the truth did not meet key Swedish investigators. .
It was on the Q factor that every ambassador in Switzerland, Sweden and Italy was evaluated for their performance. One permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland (PR) who was in weekly contact with Brajesh Mishra, lied to the Swiss about his interest in following the Bofors case. The official contact between India and Switzerland is through Bern, the Swiss capital. He had no business interfering in bilateral matters between two states. It is because of Q that none of this is in the public domain.
1997. Such was the detail of the money trail in the 350-odd leaked documents that the world’s best lawyers in the world’s toughest courts could not save the guilty among whom was Q. Such was the enormity and grandeur of the judgment in favour of India that Switzerland modified its laws for mutual assistance in criminal matters to third countries. Calling the decision “spectacular” as it had helped them plug holes in their own system, Swiss officials and lawmakers welcomed the Bofors-India ruling as proof that their country was not a haven for tainted money. Criminals could no longer delay or deny access to secret bank accounts. They could appeal only once at the federal level instead of numerous cantonal procedures and delays. The Marcos case from the Philippines and the Bofors case from India had rocked Switzerland in the 80s. The Marcos money was held under false names and codes and getting to the exact bank account numbers was not easy. Q was not bothered with such details – he was a blink away from the money. He knew he could buck India.
So in 1997, when I stood next to the Indian ambassador to Switzerland, KP Balakrishnan, (image given below) I had a pretty good idea about what was in the sealed box of secret documents from Swiss banks to India. Over 10 years of my life (1986-1997) running between Switzerland and Sweden investigating the case, six of which was sitting outside courts in various parts of Switzerland finally had a meaning.
Neither the Swiss courts nor the Swedish investigators cared who Q was. For them, he was the political payment, the entity that comes in when all the numbers are on the table and walks away with a portion of the loot without any questions. For them, he was involved in a major criminal act against the government of India.
July 13, 2013. The phone rang off the hook. Somebody called Q had died, so could they get a byte? It was not an important story, they all said, since it was breaking on a weekend and the editors and anchors were away. So, who wanted to speak to me? A junior anchor, one of them said. Like a junior engineer in Bhopal, I thought.
One television channel wanted to record my reaction before Q’s death was confirmed. Upon prodding, one of them was honest enough to say they had no idea why they were calling me except that there was this database on Bofors with my number. Another said they would connect with me live at 1 am India time without disclosing my location.
To all those who want to save India from corruption, I ask – my number is on a data base, but where are the documents India received in a sealed box from Switzerland?.
RIP Q. You knew what you were doing. And you did it without fear and with favour.
You can watch Chitra Subramaniam Duella’s interview on why India still doesn’t know the truth about Bofors.
http://www.newslaundry.com/2012/05/chit ... nd-bofors/
This ghost will not go away that easily
Tuesday, 23 July 2013 | A Surya Prakash |
Many people believe that the death of Ottavio Quattrocchi will effectively put the lid on the Bofors scandal, and consign the issue to the dustbin of history. They are mistaken. Closure will come when truth is out
The news of the demise of Ottavio Quattrocchi, the Italian businessman and close friend of Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi, has prompted some people to say that with his passing, the Bofors kickbacks scandal is laid to rest. To put it mildly, this is wishful thinking.
So many in the dramatis personae of the Bofors Saga are no more. Rajiv Gandhi, Martin Ardbo (president of Bofors when the deal was signed and whose diary entries gave vital clues to the Swedish police), former Defence Secretary SK Bhatnagar, Win Chadha, the company’s agent in India, and now Ottavio Quattrocchi. With the passing of each of these individuals, commentators speculated that the scandal will die a natural death. But, no such thing has happened. And the reason for this is simple: The people of India know that certain persons in power knocked off commissions and bribes while finalising the contract with the Swedish arms manufacturer for supply of field guns. They also know that nobody was punished for these offences.
Although Congress-led Governments at the Centre have tried to bury the scam, there were independent investigators and institutions in the country, including the media, which felt duty-bound to put the facts in the public domain. One such institution was a Delhi Bench of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal. Even as the CBI responded to its master’s voice, this Tribunal did the most detailed examination of the involvement of Ottavio Quattrocchi as a middleman in the Bofors payoffs scandal. Some key points made by the Tribunal are worthy of mention here:
Ottavio Quattrocchi remained in India from February 28, 1965 to July 29, 1993, except for a brief interval from March 4, 1966 to June 12, 1968. He was a certified chartered accountant by profession, working with Snamprogetti, an Italian multinational company, but “neither Snamprogetti nor Ottavio Quattrocchi had any experience of guns, gun-systems or any related defence equipments”.
The Tribunal noted that despite the Indian Government’s policy against suppliers hiring agents, Bofors entered into a fresh consultancy agreement with a company called AE Services Limited, UK, on November 15, 1985, at the behest of Ottavio Quattrocchi. An extraordinary aspect of this deal was that Bofors committed itself to pay this company three per cent of the total value of the contract only if the Indian Government awarded it the contract by March 31, 1986 (that is within 137 days of the signing of the contract on November 15, 1985). This was indeed an extraordinary stipulation and a tough deadline to meet specially when it concerned a major international weapons deal. But what was even more extraordinary was that Ottavio Quattrocchi met that deadline! The Rajiv Gandhi Government signed the deal with Bofors on March 24, 1986 — just a week before the deadline set by Bofors was to expire.
After signing the contract with Bofors, the Indian Government released the first tranche of payments to Bofors which was equivalent to 20 per cent of the contract value on May 2, 1986. Once it received the first tranche, Bofors remitted US$7.343 million on September 03, 1986, to A/c No 18051-53 of AE Services Limited at Nordfinanz Bank, Zurich. This worked out to exactly three per cent of the advance payment made by India. Thereafter, the Tribunal recorded the money trail, as tracked by the investigators, in detail. From Nordfinanz Bank the money was transferred to Account No 254.561.60W of Colbar Investments Limited (a company registered in Panama) in the Union Bank of Switzerland, Geneva in September, 1986. From this account, again the funds were moved to Account No 488.320.60 X of a company called Wetelsen Overseas, SA in the same bank in July 1988. Thereafter, the funds were once again moved to Account No. 123983 of International Investments Development Company in Guernsey (Channel Islands) in May 1990. The ITAT said on the basis of records before it that “these Accounts of Colbar Investments as well as Wetelsen Overseas were being controlled by Ottavio Quattrocchi and his wife Maria Quattrocchi”.
In the final analysis, the tribunal noted that Win Chadha and Ottavio Quattrocchi had been transferring the funds received from Bofors frequently from one account to another and from one jurisdiction to another to avoid detection and to obliterate the money trail.
In the final analysis, Bofors paid out the equivalent of 243 million Swedish kroners as commission to Ottavio Quattrocchi and Win Chadha. But the most extraordinary development was that AE Services unilaterally announced that it would forego the rest of the commission due to it from Bofors, after the kickbacks scandal broke out in April 1987.
Strangely, despite this clinching evidence of Ottavio Quattrocchi getting commissions from Bofors, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ensured the defreezing of Ottavio Quattrocchi’s bank account by the UK Government and ordered the CBI to withdraw the case against him. People also recall how Ms Gandhi protested angrily at a Press conference at the Congress headquarters some years ago and asked, “Where is the proof? Show me the proof”, when a correspondent asked her how Ottavio Quattrocchi got paid when we bought guns from Bofors. Ms Quattrocchi has been saying much the same thing. But these loud protestations will not help.
No financial or bribery scandal will fade out of public memory unless there is adequate reparation for the losses suffered by the exchequer. Unless this happens, a scandal is deathless. It will linger in the public mind and will be passed on, possibly with some embellishments, from one generation to another. While this is generally the case, it is more so in cases concerning a nation’s security. The taking of bribes or commissions when we buy guns for our soldiers is deemed an act of treachery (desh droh) and is never forgotten. Meanwhile, despite this clinching evidence of the money trail, Ms Quattrocchi is fooling nobody by claiming that her husband was “hounded for over 20 years” over the kickbacks issue.
The key figures in this scandal are all dead and they have gone unpunished. In this scenario, there is only one situation in which the Indian public conscience can be appeased. That is when the Quattrocchis accept the truth that they got payments from Bofors when we bought guns for our Army and return the money to the people of India. This could create an incentive for the people to forget the scandal. Until they do that, the ghost of Bofors will continue to haunt the Quattrocchis and those for whom they batted all these years.
The current Indian government has been reduced to a sham. There is not a single show of consistency and seriousness in any sector of governance. The UPA had come back to power after a comparatively better first stint where its senior ally had shown some grit to defeat the Leftist detractors when it came to serving the national interest. Its return to power was also facilitated by a hapless opposition. But the story was over within a year after it came to office in 2009. Ever since the Commonwealth Games fiasco broke out, it has been a routine affair of political wrestling for the Congress-led ruling coalition. Gandhis have weakened, so has Congress The Congress even had major confrontation with some of its major allies and the government was reduced to a working minority within three years of coming to power. The opposition is in no good position either for the NDA is suffering a far more alarming erosion, but that doesn't leave the Congress assured. It is a peculiar situation where neither of the two national parties have been successful to take advantage of the opponent's shortcomings and reached a stalemate and are rallying around one individual named Narendra Modi. The centralist force in the Congress has weakened The Congress's planned insanity of attacking Modi on every second issue and the continuous goof-ups prove that the party's central leadership, the Gandhis, has considerably weakened. Compared to what it was once, the dynasty has clearly lost its sheen and it has put the party of sycophants under considerable stress. Sonia Gandhi has never tried to be an Indira Gandhi and neither Rahul Gandhi showed any eagerness to become a Sanjay Gandhi. The duo is hardly found speaking to the media, unlike some of the earlier Gandhi leaders, and it has left an adverse impact on the party's image. The loosening centralism in Congress has 'democratised' it for the bad The loosening of the centralist powerhouse has in a way 'democratised' the party structure and we are seeing too many people, who otherwise would have been lost in the crowd, speaking their minds often contradicting each other. This is bound to pose a major threat to the Congress for the sudden 'decentralisation', no matter how noble Rahul Gandhi's project of inner democracy looks, is only going to loosen the glue which has held numerous factions in the party together. We may wait till one massive Lok Sabha election loss and the consequences might become visible faster than expected. Comparison with Indira Gandhi's 1966-77 rule It is amazing to see how a ruling coalition, despite ruling for almost a decade now, is struggling every day to come to terms with the governance as if it is its first day in office. If we compare this with Indira Gandhi's rule from 1966-77, one can see how much the top-down model if working in the Congress has fallen apart. Indira Gandhi wasn't a great political manager but was a ruthless politician who made her populism speak. Her administrative failures cost her dearly in 1977 but she did not let it go before making a desperate attempt in 1975 by proclaiming Emergency. The party knows 2014 won't be good and it has been hit by panic: Where are the Gandhis? The current Congress-led government knows quite well that 2014 won't bring happy news but yet there is a baffling lethargy which is in display even at the dying hours. Motormouths are continuing to harm the party further but there is no control from the top to mend things, even in a losing battle. Yes, Rahul Gandhi utters some occasional strong words, but one feels the current leaders of the dynasty lack the teeth to drive the party as per its own liking.
Result: More stupidity at display at non-existent local levels. The party had lost its ideology in 1966 when Lal Bahadur Shastri died and Indira Gandhi took over. Till 1989 (with three years hiatus between 1977 and 1980), the Gandhis gave the party an overwhelming leadership. But pragmatism found an opportunity in Congress rule after a long time in 1991 under the leadership of PV Narasimha Rao and after he lost in 1996, the party was in a deep danger till Sonia Gandhi was given an emergency call. Has the institution called Gandhi dynasty crumbled? But after a decade and a half of her leadership at the helm, the party looks to be back to square one and it seems it could again find itself in a post-1996 like situation soon. But this was bound to happen once the Institution called Gandhis were on the decline.
Read more at: http://news.oneindia.in/feature/2013/we ... 69334.html
The new Switzerland
Dubai has become the hottest destination for political black monies from India.
By Gautam Sen (26 July 2013)
London: New forms of racketeering have been institutionalised by India’s political elite, with a huge proliferation of the disturbing phenomena during United Progressive Alliance rule. As India’s economy has grown, the greed of its political and bureaucratic elites has ascended new heights. They are compromising India’s well-being and security on a scale that will lead to easily foreseeable devastating consequences. Bureaucrats and politicians have taken to extorting payments from businesses by ruthlessly wielding state power. One major industry that has become a conduit for laundering the proceeds of high crime is India’s airline sector. The ownership of some airlines is unclear, as Arun Shourie’s bombshell statement in the Lok Sabha revealed in August 2001. It is suspected they are being fronted on behalf of Indian politicians and international terrorists engaged in war against India and its people. Some of these people live in security and comfort in Pakistan and their dual operational headquarters is the United Arab Emirates, most particularly Dubai. This is the city whose privileged Arab denizens espouse shameless racial contempt towards South Asians and justify, according to the London Guardian, the appalling treatment of migrant labour that created the glitz and prosperity of Dubai by asserting, "We need slaves to build monuments. Look who built the pyramids -- they were slaves."
A stratagem to launder and bring black money back into India is through investments by beneficiaries of corrupt favours in shell companies owned by nominees of senior politicians or via donations to fictitious charitable activities of their relatives. The Aircel Maxis scandal has blown this type of criminal activity wide open but the scale is truly staggering. Almost all business deals, unfailingly subject to regulatory approval, oblige payments to key political families, whether they are for contracts to provide seats on Air India’s Boeing fleet, from a firm deemed unsuitable by Boeing itself, or for the entry of foreign direct investment into India in retail. Scams and outright robbery have become so brazen that exempting members of Indian political families from airport security and customs’ scrutiny is leading to extraordinary malfeasance, from importing foreign and counterfeit currency to exporting stolen heritage artefacts. It is pertinent that knowledgeable insiders indicate it is not Switzerland where the proceeds of Indian crime, including extortion by politicians, are concealed. Contrary to the mystifying obsessions of some, who rail against black money, it is Hong Kong, Singapore and, most of all, Dubai where the proceeds of global crime are secreted. Indian businessmen in Hong Kong express exasperation at the regularity with which they are approached by Indian politicians to invest sums in excess of £5 million.
All the evidence suggests that bribery was the catalyst that allowed FDI into Indian retail, permitting entry to players whose known behaviour suggests they are latter day counterparts of the marauding East India Company. Numerous legal disputes and instances of political protest against them can be discovered from a cursory scan of the Internet. The stipulations and provisions that will supposedly regulate their conduct and obligations do not matter one whit because once established within India they will buy the legislation necessary for a malleable political environment and illegitimate profiteering. It might be noted that the moment the prime minister and a totally untrustworthy Central Bureau of Investigation fail to find evidence of corruption in a particular instance, it points to the involvement of the most powerful in the land. More to the point in the case of the proposed Etihad purchase of equity in Jet Airways is the UAE’s reputation as the financial counterpart to the operational terror hub that is Pakistan, with which it enjoys the most intimate ties. Significantly, like another organisation, popular in Pakistan for charitable work, which has promised a war of annihilation against India, Etihad Airways is also involved in good works in Pakistan.
The UAE origin of Etihad Airways exhorts urgent and searching scrutiny of its proposed acquisition of equity in Jet Airways to enter the Indian market. Unfortunately, investigation of the Jet Airways-Etihad deal by official agencies, particularly the Central Bureau of Investigation, suggests that political families, who will be the key beneficiaries of the purchase, are covertly organizing the basis for a clean chit to it. The long-term profitability of the Indian airline market is guaranteed since air travel within the country will grow by leaps and bounds in coming decades. The resulting huge proceeds may well accrue to hostile agencies that will use them to continue waging war against India. One negative outcome will be to further undermine Air India, which has already led to huge costs for the taxpayer, because politicians have interfered wilfully with its operations to make it less and less attractive to customers. Yet, in its unseemly haste to plug the balance of payments deficit, the United Progressive Alliance is rushing headlong into an array of murky international financial deals that will do untold long-term harm to the Indian economy though the corrupt will of course benefit.
Perhaps calling an election soon will be prudent since so much worse is in prospect for the Indian economy and its people by the time of its scheduled final date. A regime in disarray and fearful of the exposure of its serial acts of illegality and constitutional improprieties is capable of making arbitrary compromises to save itself. Foreign agencies known to collect evidence of such misconduct assiduously are likely pressing India to make concessions on a number of critical issues and effectively surrender national interests. In the meantime, Mumbai is becoming a mere outpost of Dubai’s criminal reach rather than dominating the ocean rim that separates them, as it should by virtue of sheer size. Its starlets rush there to entertain and Indian politicians to hide ill- gotten riches, betraying vital national interests to the very people waging war against their own country, in a form of sell-out with few historical parallels.
Dr Gautam Sen has taught Political Economy at the London School of Economics.
is on maino's command?How convenient and handy.The recording device handed over by the then Army Chief V K Singh, purported to carry a conversation relating to bribe offer made to him, is malfunctioning and nothing can be retrieved from it, says Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
Quoting a forensic report, highly placed sources in the CBI said there was noise coming out of the device and nothing was audible after which it was sent for examination at the Central Forensic and Scientific Laboratory (CFSL).
UnrealTimes on how the Coalgate and Sajjan Kumar got letoff:On the day that a Delhi court decided last week that Congress leader, Sajjan Kumar, was not guilty of involvement in the organised killing of Sikhs in 1984 I had an accidental encounter that became an epiphany in more ways than one. It was a day filled with hectic political activity. The Supreme Court pulled up the director of the CBI (Central Bureau of Intelligence) for sharing his report on the coal scandal with the Law Minister. The government’s top law officers fought with each other and one of them resigned on the grounds that he was being made a scapegoat. And, then late in the afternoon came the news that Sajjan Kumar had been found not guilty of murder and inciting a mob to violence even if his five co-defendants had. There was so much going on that Barkha did a special show and I was invited to be a panellist.
The horror! The horror!
Having covered the pogroms in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s assassination and because I continue to remember them with horror and shame I always accept any chance to talk about what happened. I consider it my duty to do this in the hope that justice will be done one day even if thirty years have passed without someone like Jagdish Kaur finding closure. She was on the panel with me and when she was asked by Barkha to describe what she felt about Sajjan Kumar being acquitted she said she felt ‘broken inside’. She then went on to ask why the judge should have found it in him to free the leader of the mob that killed her husband, young son and three relatives while finding his co-defendants guilty. ‘They were just obeying his instructions,’ she said ‘he was the leader. I saw him with my own eyes and with my own ears heard him say there should be not a single Sikh left alive. And, if there are Hindu homes that are giving them shelter burn them down as well.’ It was heart-rending to hear her words and they brought back memories of those terrible three days in which the streets of Delhi became killing fields.
The eminent lawyer, H.S. Phoolka, was part of Barkha’s panel and explained that the reason why Sajjan Kumar had got away with murder was because the police had chosen to make a weak case against him. Naresh Gujral, who organized vigilante squads in his neighbourhood to protect Sikhs fleeing the death squads, was also on the panel and what we should have spent our time talking about was why it had taken thirty years for justice to begin to be done in one of the most shameful crimes in Indian history. But, Barkha had reckoned without Mani Shankar Aiyer’s ability to distract attention from a shadow of blame falling on his late leader, Rajiv Gandhi.
He chose to do this by launching an ugly personal attack on me. A propos of nothing he said ‘you sucked up to me for six months’. Sucking up has been his outstanding forte ever since he came into politics and is famously not mine so I have no idea what he meant by this. But, he then proceeded to talk about how I had written ‘a filthy book after going to dinner parties’. I know what he meant by this. In ‘Durbar’ he does not emerge as a hero so much as a sniveling sycophant so he cannot have been happy with the book. And, what would have distressed him even more is that I write about dinner parties at which I met Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. The courtiers who surround Sonia have taken particular exception to this.
If Mani Shankar had read ‘Durbar’ more carefully he would have discovered that I describe the massacres in Delhi in considerable detail and this may perhaps have made him realize that he was showing sickening contempt for Jagdish Kaur’s pain. But, even as I write these words I know that the courtiers who encircle the Gandhi dynasty singularly lack compassion. They are also incapable of finding fault with anything that the dynasty does so Mani Shankar tried to whitewash Rajiv Gandhi’s role in the massacres by saying that he had reacted promptly to stop the violence. This caused Naresh Gujral to say angrily that this was not true. People like Inder Gujral and Chandrashekhar, he said, had pleaded with the prime minister to call the army out if he could not control the situation and he had done nothing for three days. At the end of these three days more than 3,000 Sikhs had been killed in Delhi alone.
A mockery of tragedy
Since then what has been done in the name of justice has been a travesty. In thirty years of inquiry commissions and court cases all that has happened is that the Congress Party has gone out of its way to make sure that none of its senior leaders were implicated. The police has played an active role in helping this happen because otherwise the searchlight would turn on them and reveal thousands of cases, like that of Jagdish Kaur, when they refused to register an FIR. They told her, she said, that many more Sikhs needed to die so they could register a case together.
So what was my epiphany? Firstly, realization that Mani Shankar Aiyar has no right to be in public life because of his total lack of compassion. And, then the realisation that the Congress Party was only bluffing when its senior leaders, Dr. Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, apologized, twenty-five years after the massacres, for what happened to the Sikhs in 1984. If they had meant their apology sincerely would they have allowed a senior Congress leader, and a close aide of Rajiv Gandhi, to go on national television and mock the terrible grief of one of the victims of the violence? Would they have allowed him to tell a widow who saw her husband and son being burned alive to ‘carry on fighting for justice’ even if takes another thirty years? Would they have allowed him to talk sneeringly about ‘kangaroo court’ justice when there cannot be a better example of distorted justice than what has happened to the victims of the Sikh pogroms? Would they have allowed Sajjan Kumar to contest elections on a Congress ticket after 1984? I left Barkha’s show that evening without being able to find a single comforting word to say to Jagdish Kaur.
Sonia is now advised to take control of Tirupti's gold reserve worth 1.7 Trillion USD
The Finance Minister and the RBI Governor should jointly – and immediately – approach the trustees of Tirupati Trust Foundation. Three of these are State government appointees, and, given the current political dispensation, this is a distinct advantage. They should, of course, offer prayers and an opportunity for the already hugely rich trust to make significant additional amounts of money.
While there are no definitive statistics available, I believe the Tirupati Trust Foundation has well over 1,000 tonnes of gold. The number I was actually told was 1,700 tonnes, which is about 5% of all the gold held in India (between 30,000 and 35,000 tonnes). To get really excited, multiply that total amount of gold by $ 48.5 million (the value of a tonne of gold at $ 1,350 an ounce) which comes to between $ 1.5 and 1.7 trillion – that’s right, trillion.
These, by the way, are assets – it is money we Indians own. And, given that they are foreign currency assets, it is hard to understand why we have an FX problem.
The FM and the Governor should offer the Tirupati trustees annual earnings of, say, 3,000 cr [2% interest on 500 tonnes of gold] PLUS savings of the cost of storage of the gold, which, itself could be a significant amount. And, of course, that the gold would be safe with, say, State Bank of India and that it can be retrieved at one day’s notice. It’s hard to see how any trustee could turn this down.
http://www.emecklai.com/%28X%281%29S%28 ... eSupport=1
Calculation is off by orders of magnitude, 1700 * $48.5 million = $82.45 billonSushupti wrote:Sonia is now advised to take control of Tirupti's gold reserve worth 1.7 Trillion USD
The Finance Minister and the RBI Governor should jointly – and immediately – approach the trustees of Tirupati Trust Foundation. Three of these are State government appointees, and, given the current political dispensation, this is a distinct advantage. They should, of course, offer prayers and an opportunity for the already hugely rich trust to make significant additional amounts of money.
While there are no definitive statistics available, I believe the Tirupati Trust Foundation has well over 1,000 tonnes of gold. The number I was actually told was 1,700 tonnes, which is about 5% of all the gold held in India (between 30,000 and 35,000 tonnes). To get really excited, multiply that total amount of gold by $ 48.5 million (the value of a tonne of gold at $ 1,350 an ounce) which comes to between $ 1.5 and 1.7 trillion – that’s right, trillion.
These, by the way, are assets – it is money we Indians own. And, given that they are foreign currency assets, it is hard to understand why we have an FX problem.
The FM and the Governor should offer the Tirupati trustees annual earnings of, say, 3,000 cr [2% interest on 500 tonnes of gold] PLUS savings of the cost of storage of the gold, which, itself could be a significant amount. And, of course, that the gold would be safe with, say, State Bank of India and that it can be retrieved at one day’s notice. It’s hard to see how any trustee could turn this down.
http://www.emecklai.com/%28X%281%29S%28 ... eSupport=1
A senior official of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) has said that the auditor is in possession of all the “key documents” related to the allotment of captive coal blocks between 1993 and 2012. The official did not want to be identified. The CAG audited the entire process of coal block allotments and came out with a report last year that said the process was flawed and possibly fraudulent and had caused the government exchequer a notional loss to the tune of Rs.1.86 trillion.
“It is our practice to retain copies of all the key documents pertaining to an audit report. These are the documents that are crucial to the report,” the CAG official said.
On Tuesday, the government said that it will make “all possible efforts” to locate the files that went missing. “As the investigation progresses, if additional documents are called for by CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation), the ministry would supply them to CBI and if any document is not available, it shall make every effort to trace and supply the same to CBI,” coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal said in a written statement to the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday. An inter-ministerial panel is looking into the case of the missing files, he added.
On 6 August, the Supreme Court, which is looking into the case, and also supervising the CBI’s investigation, asked the government to immediately hand over all relevant documents to the federal investigation agency.
andMP accuses top legal official of holding Swiss bank account
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/news/mp- ... nk-account
Lok Sabha: Gurudas Dasgupta moves privilege notice against Attorney General -- PTI
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.ca/2013/ ... moves.html
There are no damn trial balloons or conspiracy theories or saffron theories. The state of nation and events are all in front of us which were called as conspiracy theories on this forum.krithivas wrote:Check out
https://twitter.com/sardesairajdeep
Rajeev Sardesai (IBN Editor in Chief) applauds idiot Jamal Mecklai's suggestion to sell Tirupati Gold to reverse the plunge of Indian Rupee. UPA led the unchecked loot of natural resources and is now training its gun on other treasures (Hindu property in this case). There is definite method to the trial balloons being launched here.
In parting shot, Subbarao tears into govt for economic mess
By Manju AB Aug 29 2013 , Mumbai
Tags: Views
Outgoing RBI governor D Subbarao on Thursday took a dig at the government and blamed its ‘loose fiscal stance’ for the current economic woes.
He said more than US Fed tapering, ‘domestic structural factors’ were the root cause of the rupee depreciation.
Subbarao retires on September 4 after being at the helm of the central bank for five years.
Delivering the Nani Palkhivala memorial lecture — his last public speech as RBI governor — in Mumbai, Subbarao said for the past three years the government relied on the loose monetary policy stance of western economies to fund the CAD.
While the speed and timing of the rupee’s depreciation was due to the markets’ knee-jerk reaction to the US Fed announcement, Subbarao said, “We will go astray, both in the diagnosis and remedy, if we do not acknowledge that the root cause of the problem is domestic structural factors.”
“There has been a growing tendency to attribute all of this (ferocity of rupee depreciation) to the tapering of ultra-easy monetary policy by the US Fed. Such a diagnosis, I believe, is misleading,” he said, as he held the government accountable for the current mess.
In New Delhi, Chidambaram reacted to Subbarao’s comments on the reasons of the current economic woes, saying this was what he had said a couple of days ago. “This is no different from what I said day before yesterday,” he said.
Subbarao spoke at length on the central bank’s autonomy and said there had been a lot of media coverage on policy differences between the government and RBI.
“Gerard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, once said, ‘I am often frustrated by the Bundesbank. But thank god, it exists.’ I do hope finance minister P Chidambaram will one day say, ‘I am often frustrated by the Reserve Bank of India, so frustrated that I want to go for a walk, even if I have to walk alone. But thank god, the Reserve Bank exists.”
All along his five-year tenure, Subbarao fiercely guarded RBI’s autonomy and opposed the government’s plan to bring in a super-regulator superseding all the regulators, including the central bank.
“An autonomous and apolitical central bank is a delicate arrangement too, and will work only if the government respects the autonomy of the central bank, and the central bank itself stays within its mandate, delivers on that mandate and renders accountability for the outcomes of its policies and actions,” he said.
Looking back at RBI’s policy stance during his tenure, Subbarao said, “Had we used the breathing time that this (easy money policy) gave us to address the structural factors and brought the CAD down to its sustainable level, we would have been able to withstand the tapering of the ultra-easy policy of the US Fed. But we did not, and therefore, made ourselves vulnerable to the sudden stop and exit of capital flows driven by global sentiment; and the eventual cost of adjustment too went up sharply.”
He blamed the supply constraints for many of the economy’s woes. Subbarao said CAD could increase substantially even in a low-growth environment if supply constraints impacted both growth and external trade, as has been the case now. The only lasting solution to India’s external sector problem, he said, was to reduce the CAD to a sustainable level and finance the reduced CAD through stable and non-debt flows.
“Reducing CAD requires structural solutions. RBI has very little policy space or instruments to deliver the needed structural solution. They fall within the ambit of the government. Structural adjustments will also take time. In the interim, we need to stabilise market volatility, a task that falls within the domain of RBI,” he pointed out
“Our efforts over the last few years, particularly the last three months, have been to smoothen the volatility as the exchange rate adjusts to a market-determined level so as to make the near-term cost of adjustment less onerous for firms, households and banks,” he said.
Dismissing criticism that RBI’s policy measures were confusing and betrayed lack of resolve to curb exchange rate volatility, Subbarao said the only gap could have been the failure to communicate the measures more effectively.
manjuab@mydigitalfc.com
Suraj wrote:A Resurgent India Bond v2 today to bridge the CAD is a dumb idea for multiple reasons:
* In 1998, NRI remittances were <$10 billion, of which RIB inflows were a significant component. Back then, the CAD was comparatively tiny, and a few billion easily bridged the gap.
* In 2012-13, NRI remittance were $71 billion - the most received by any country in the world from its diaspora. Net services trade surplus generates more invisible inflows - the total adding up to $100-120 billion. GoI *still* cannot manage BoP with that much of a surplus on the non-merchandise trade and inflow front ?
It is their lack of policy foresight that resulted in a CAD of $170 billion, even though invisibles including NRI remittance inflows generate a >$100 billion net inflows - over 5% of GDP - to compensate for a CAD. The solution is not to ask for more money to compensate for their incompetence - it's not even a cheap solution, much less a moral one, because they'll be compelled to offer a high coupon rate and tax benefits that adds to the deficit. The bond would have to be $20-30 billion, for which the coupon outflow of ~$2 billion (near 10% return) would be a massive fiscal liability.
In 1998 the situation was caused by GoI doing something the population largely supported, and the diaspora was willing to step up and pay in to support the government in response to the punitive actions of other nations. Today, GoI has no one to blame but itself - if it shows no willingness to suffer great pain and implement reforms, they are not going to convince many to support them.
