New Delhi, May 23 :    New Delhi, May 23:  Air-India managing director Michael P. Mascarenhas was today suspended and his deputy J.N. Gogoi asked to take over the job. Mascarenhas, who has long been under a cloud over a slew of deals, has been suspended on the basis of a vigilance report which indicts him for favouring Air-India's former general sales agent in the United Kingdom, Welcome Travels, with larger than permitted commissions in the form of incentives. An internal note says the report has found a 'conspiracy to unduly favour Welcome Travels' and 'there is a genuine apprehension of tampering with documents. As such, it was also decided that Mascarenhas and P.K. Sinha, regional director, India, be placed under suspension.' The Air-India chief is being accused of having paid Welcome Travels £725,000 beyond what the company was supposed to receive. Not only was this firm paid undue commissions termed productivity-linked incentives over and above the normal rates, it also took incentive cuts on tickets sold by Air-India's own offices in the London sector. Incentives were negotiated without permission from the airline's board of directors and were being paid on gross, and not net, revenues as contracted, civil aviation ministry officials said. They claimed that the orders had been issued today after the charges were confirmed by three sets of reports - prepared by M.B. Sagar, acting chief vigilance officer, the comptroller and auditor general of India and by V.K. Verma, Air-India's director, corporate affairs. Mascarenhas had earlier come under a cloud over an aircraft wet-lease (hired with crew) deal he had signed with an unknown company called Caribjet which tipped the country's national carrier into the red. Air-India ran up a Rs 321-crore loss during a three-year period by flying wet-leased planes, rented on terms loaded in favour of leasing companies. A special audit probe conducted by the government had revealed that 'wet-lease losses have constituted over 45 per cent of total losses run up by the national carrier between fiscal years 1994-1995 and 1997-1998'. The report said the cost of the first wet-lease deal signed by Air-India with Caribjet for two Airbus-310s in November 1994 was jacked up by the airline's then commercial director, Michael Mascarenhas, by $157 per block hour which worked out to a total additional payout of Rs 3.37 crore. This was also done by the airline management without reference to the board. The total rent eventually worked out to $1.72 million a plane a month, which was higher than the $1.62 million quoted by a rival bidder that was rejected. No action was taken against Mascarenhas on the basis of this report despite the fact that the charges were far more serious and the losses ran far higher than those for which he has now been suspended.