Mediapart, a French online portal has reinforced Rahul Gandhi’s long-standing allegations that the purchase of Rafale jets had some kind of scam or another, however with a twist. The news portal has claimed that a middleman named Sushen Gupta, received pay-offs of fake invoices to ‘facilitate’ the Rafale deal during the UPA regime. Reportedly, Gupta received 7.5 million euros as kickbacks between 2007 and 2012.
According to the French website, the bribes were paid to Gupta through his Mauritius entity Interstellar, in the guise of “dubious IT contracts”.
The report read, “It involves offshore companies, dubious contracts and ‘false’ invoices. Mediapart can reveal that detectives from India’s federal police force, the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI), and colleagues from the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which fights money laundering, have had proof since October 2018 that Dassault paid at least €7.5 million in secret commissions to middleman Sushen Gupta.”
Mediapart sensationally also claimed that Indian agencies did not pursue the case despite the existence of the fake invoices – suggesting that 24, Akbar Road might have had a part to play in postponing the investigation.
Mediapart in the past has tried to corner the NDA government for the Rafale scam by twisting the narrative and cherry-picking facts to string together a fanciful story. However, in attempting to do so, it has once again opened the pandora box of UPA’s long list of scams.
Sushen Gupta – an influential UPA era middleman
It is pertinent to note that Sushen Mohan Gupta was a very influential middleman during the UPA era. In 2019, he was arrested in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper deal case, another defence deal scam worth crores in during the UPA government.
In the AugustaWestland VVIP chopper deal, Gupta had made millions of Euros and was simultaneously minting money in the Rafale deal by receiving the aforementioned kickbacks.
According to investigation agencies, in the AugustaWestland VVIP chopper deal, “More than Rs 50 crore shown to have been received from ‘RG’ between 2004 to 2016, whereas the ‘RG’ identified by Gupta, i.e., Rajat Gupta, had admitted to have cash transactions with Sushen from 2007 onwards and the same are being quantified.”
Rahul and Congress digging a grave for themselves
Before the 2019 general election, Congress tried tooth and nail to dig a scam out of the Rafale deal. The party deployed its loonies in the left-liberal media establishment to create a story out of thin air and tarnish the image of the Modi government.
The Congress party tried to take on the Modi government on the Rafale deal but the equations have now turned the exact opposite because the Congress-led UPA government is now under question for 14.6 million Euros of kickbacks paid for the deal.
Read More: Rahul Gandhi’s bundle of lies about the Rafale deal
After the NDA Government came to power, the UPA-era deal was scrapped and the Indian Government secured a government-to-government deal that involved India buying 36 Rafale jets directly from the French Government. The UPA deal, struck in 2012, was not a viable one, the then defence minister Manohar Parrikar maintained, implying that it would have never been closed and that, therefore, any comparison was moot.