Ottavio Quattrocchi

New Delhi, July 13: Ottavio Quattrocchi, the Italian executive who was a key figure in the Bofors case, has died in Milan following a stroke.

Quattrocchi, 72, died last night and his funeral will take place on Monday, a family member said over the phone.

The CBI chargesheet filed in 1999 had named Quattrocchi, a friend of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, as one of the accused in the Rs 64-crore Bofors payoffs case. By then, it was six years since he had left India.

Quattrocchi was discharged from the case by a Delhi court in 2011, after the CBI had tried but failed to get him back to India. It lost two extradition appeals — in Malaysia in 2002 and in Argentina in 2007.