The New Rafale Allegations: All You Need To Know

This French journalist alleged corruption in the Rafale deal. Yann Philippin told Brut why an average Indian should be concerned…

Transcript

00:00There is a suspicious activity both during UPA and under BGP governments.

00:08It's a very highly political case, but it's not one party's case.

00:11So it's really a case for the Indians for transparency regarding these huge arms deals.

01:30What we

01:59reveal is the fake invoices that have been used by Mr. Gupta to cash the money from Dassault,

02:08through a very opaque arrangement with inflated IT contracts.

02:13And so we revealed this whole financial scheme that allowed Mr. Gupta to cash more than 7 million

02:20euros very discreetly from Dassault in a shell company in Mauritius.

02:25Media investigation shows that Mr. Gupta received at least 12 million euros from Dassault

02:33between 2001, which was the date India announced their will to purchase the planes.

02:40Then there's been a tender in 2007. This tender has been won by Dassault in 2012.

02:45And during this whole period, this first period, in fact, of the tender,

02:49Dassault paid more than 12 million euros to Mr. Gupta.

02:55What happened is that he used an IT Indian company, which is called IDS,

03:07which was getting real contracts for Dassault. But in fact, these contracts were overpaid.

03:25A little part came to IDS in India to do the real IT work. And the majority of the firm

03:32was then paid by Interdev to another shell company in Mauritius called Interstellar.

03:38And what we have is these invoices between Interstellar and Interdev.

04:25So

04:45the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate of India received the information about

04:52the secret commissions as early as October 2018. And despite this, they didn't act.

04:59There was no criminal probe opened about the Rafale deal. One week before receiving the

05:05Mauritius documents showing payment of commissions under the UPA Congress government,

05:11the CBI received a complaint about suspicious facts that happened during the second part

05:16under Mr. Modi's government. So they added elements about both parties and governments,

05:22and they didn't act.

05:47So

06:04this is a very important case for several reasons. The first one is the amount, you know,

06:09it's just the 8 billion euros that will be paid by the Indian people through their taxes,

06:15because there's been already in the past a lot of corruptions in arms trade. So the citizens

06:22basically should have the right to know how these materials, especially when they are

06:30as expensive as 8 billion euros, have been purchased and why.