You Should Care About The New Rafale Revelations. Here's Why

Brut India

The Rafale deal between India and France has been shrouded by controversy for years. This week, a French news portal published new allegations that should worry every Indian. Brut spoke to Yann Philippin, the journalist behind the investigation, to understand why his findings are important.

Transcript

00:00The money took exactly the same way than the alleged dirty money in the Augusta-Westland

00:09chopper case.

00:10It's been quite a long time now that the Enforcement Directorate obtained documents,

00:15all kinds of evidence regarding Sushen Gupta's involvement in the Rafale deal.

00:45Sushen Mohen Gupta is an aerospace and defence agent, some could call him a middleman.

01:45What we discovered is that the agents of the Enforcement Directorate, who are the

02:14agents of the Enforcement Directorate, by investigating Sushen Gupta and the money

02:21of Augusta-Westland, the alleged kickbacks, they discovered that Sushen Gupta was also

02:26the agent of Dassault in India, and that he was at the heart of the negotiations about

02:33the Rafale deal, and the documents that have been obtained by the Enforcement Directorate

02:39show very problematic behaviour from Dassault and Sushen Gupta regarding this deal.

03:06Both Dassault and his partner Thales paid a million euros of offshore commissions to

03:13Sushen Gupta's shell companies, which were registered in Mauritius, in Singapore or in

03:19Dubai.

03:20They used inflated computer services contracts, so it was not a straight payment, but Dassault

03:26bought consultancy software services from an Indian company or from a shell company

03:33in Singapore, and part of this money was then channelled to the offshore accounts of

03:39Sushen Gupta.

04:03These models were ordered for one million euros, which is quite expensive, you know,

04:12it makes 20,000 euros for a model, you know, for this price you can have, for instance,

04:16a real nice car, and what is also suspicious is that this strange payment for these models

04:25has been spotted by the French anti-corruption agency, and despite it was suspicious, they

04:31did not report this to the French prosecutors.

05:02In the accusation sheet against Sushen Gupta that they issued two years ago, they identified

05:09the fact that Mr. Gupta could have had influenced or bribed for other defence deals, that's

05:16written in the charge sheet, and they also wrote that regarding these other deals, a

05:23separate investigation would be undertaken.

05:26And two years later, as of today, there's been no visible sign that the Enforcement

05:31Directorate opened such a separate investigation on the Rafale.

05:36We of course asked them whether they did it or not, and unfortunately they did not respond.

05:42These military contracts are always very sensitive and secret.

05:46It's always very difficult for reporters to investigate these kind of deals, and that's

05:53the reason it took so long.

05:55This Rafale paper's investigation from Mediapart took more than six months, so it's been very

06:01difficult to gather all this information.

06:04Corruption should be the concerns of, and is the concerns of, many citizens.

06:10And so it is important to know what's behind the scenes in such giant deals, you know,

06:17which have bad reputations.

06:19It's not the first time that there are corruption allegations on a defence deal.

06:23What I hope is that this case will be investigated, because, you know, we are just reporters,

06:31so we don't say that we know everything.

06:34But what I'm convinced about is that there's enough elements now so that a real investigation

06:45is opened on this case, both in France and India.

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