Enforcement Directorate counsel and investigating officers told a Delhi court on Saturday that Christian Michel, the alleged middleman in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal, had named a “Mrs Gandhi”.
The claim triggered a political row as the ruling BJP interpreted it as evidence of corruption by the Congress leadership.
At the Patiala House court, the agency counsel didn’t specify the context in which Michel, a British national, had purportedly mentioned “Mrs Gandhi”.
PTI reported that the agency also told the court that Michel had handed a chit to his lawyer asking him how to handle questions on “Mrs Gandhi”. It asked that Michel be barred from meeting lawyers in custody. The court ruled that he could meet his lawyers twice a day, for 15 minutes each time, at a distance.
At one point, the counsel said Michel had referred also to the “son of the Italian lady” and how he was going to be Prime Minister of the country. There was no clarity whether these purported mentions were in connection with the alleged bribe paid in the deal.
There was also a reference to “R”.
“We need to decipher who the ‘big man’ referred to as ‘R’ is in the communication between Christian Michel and other people,” the ED counsel told the court. “We need to confront Michel with other people to decipher who ‘the big man’ or ‘R’ is.”
The agency got Michel’s custody for seven more days to interrogate him. The ED has sought restrictions on Michel’s lawyer accessing him, alleging the suspect is being tutored from outside.
Michel, extradited from the United Arab Emirates this month, and his lawyer had earlier alleged that the suspect was under pressure to make the false claim that he knew Sonia Gandhi.
As the BJP gleefully claimed on Saturday that the “family” had been exposed, the Congress dismissed the developments as a government ploy.
Union human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar said: “The revelations by the ED show that there is a ‘son of Italian lady’, ‘big man’ and ‘R’ involved. It points to a family. The Congress government was a government of corruption that compromised national security.”
Congress spokesperson R.P.N. Singh said it was known that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was pressuring the agencies to “name a person” in the case. “Under the law, the first thing a person gets is a lawyer.… But they don’t allow him to meet the lawyer; so you know what kind of a case is going on,” he said.
“We have seen what the BJP is doing here. Why does the chowkidar (watchman, which is how Modi had described himself during the 2014 campaign) against whom there is proof pressurise agencies to name a person? The person who has done the biggest chori cannot be spared.”
Modi recently told an election rally that Michel was close to the Congress leadership and would name a few big fish.
The Congress-led UPA government had scrapped the chopper contract amid allegations of kickbacks and ordered a CBI probe.
