Arms dealer Suresh Nanda is in jail after he was trapped in a bribery scandal and his passport has been impounded by the Government due to the ongoing CBI probe in two cases of alleged kickbacks in Defence deals. But the number of Central and State Government departments which have become clients of an e-commerce company he floated is increasing every day. The list now even includes the Ministry of Defence.

An investigation by The Sunday Express has found that six months ago — a full one year after Nanda was named as the middleman in the Barak missile case by the Central Bureau of Investigation in its FIR — the Defence Ministry’s Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) launched a new e-portal and announced that all vendors, if they wanted to be considered for tenders, would have to register with a company C-1 India (Commerce One).

Newspaper advertisements were also released by Ordnance factories announcing their association with C-1 India.

Vivek Agarwal, president of C-1 India, told The Sunday Express that Nanda is “no longer” associated with the firm. But the link is unquestionable. Nanda himself boasted about floating the firm in 2000 in interviews — including to this correspondent — and the office address of the company, D-5 Defence Colony, New Delhi, has a large signboard outside listing all three Nanda flagship firms: Crown Corporation, C-1 India and Dynatron Services.

M V Rao, the PMO “imposter” who was raided by the Delhi Police last February and from whose possession 1,307 pages of secret defence documents were recovered, was also a Director of C-1 India.

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