According to a report in the French online journal Mediapart, a French judge has been appointed to lead an investigation into suspected “corruption and favouritism” in the 59,000 crore Rafale deal with India for 36 fighter jets.
“On June 14, the highly sensitive investigation into the inter-governmental agreement signed in 2016 was formally opened,” according to Mediapart. According to the report, the financial crimes branch of the French public prosecutor’s office confirmed the development on Friday.
In April 2021, the French website published a series of reports on alleged irregularities in the Rafale deal.
According to one of those reports, Éliane Houlette, the former head of France’s public prosecution services’ financial crimes branch, shelved an investigation into alleged evidence of corruption in the Rafale jet deal despite the objections of colleagues. According to the report, Houlette justified her decision to halt the investigations by citing the need to protect “the interests of France, the workings of institutions.”
“Now, her successor as head of the PNF, Jean-François Bohnert, has decided to support the opening of a probe, after the complaint was updated with details from Mediapart’s recent series of investigations,” Mediapart’s latest report said.
The criminal investigation, Mediapart said, will “examine questions surrounding the actions” of former French president François Hollande, who was in office when the Rafale deal was inked, current French president Emmanuel Macron, who was at the time Hollande’s economy and finance minister, and foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, who was then holding the defence portfolio.
The jets were ordered as an emergency purchase in September 2016 through a government-to-government agreement. The deal became contentious after the Opposition, led by the Congress, claimed that the price at which India is buying Rafale planes now is 1,670 crore per plane, three times the company’s initial bid of 526 crore when the UPA tried to buy them. It also claims that a technology transfer agreement with HAL was part of the previous deal.
The NDA has not revealed the price, but former defence minister Manohar Parrikar has previously stated that the UPA deal, struck in 2012, was not a viable one, implying that it would never have been closed and that any comparison is thus moot. Indeed, the UPA was unable to complete the deal until 2014, owing to disagreements over the pricing of items that were not included in the initial bid.
The NDA government has stated that it is unable to disclose the price due to two reasons: a confidentiality agreement with France and a strategic desire to avoid showing its hand to India’s adversaries; however, it has stated that the current deal includes customised weaponry.
In November 2019, the Supreme Court heard a public interest case on the deal and said there was nothing wrong with it. The government’s auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, audited the deal in February 2019 and concluded that India had not overpaid for the jets.
