Can we please stop pretending that Ottavio Quattrocchi is ever going to be brought to justice? He is not. And, as a taxpayer, I take the strongest objection to paying for Quattrocchi’s legal expenses in Argentina and I take objection to the government of India wasting our money on an investigation that is nothing but a sham.

Why should we pay for the Central Bureau of Intelligence (CBI) to travel to distant lands in search of Quattrocchi when we know that if they caught him by mistake they would probably let him go? What was the point of sending a CBI team to Argentina when their efforts at nailing Quattrocchi were so pathetic that the Argentine court ordered the CBI to pay his legal bills for the harassment caused to this honest, upright man who has never explained why he ran away from India like a thief in the night the day it was revealed that Bofors bribes had been traced to his Swiss account?

If there was any chance of Quattrocchi being brought back and tried, it was when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was prime minister and mysteriously nothing happened. The Bharatiya Janata Party appears to have done its best to protect him, so can they stop making a noise now that there is no chance of his being brought back? Why should anything happen now when Quattrocchi’s ex-best friend, Sonia Gandhi, is the most powerful political figure in this government.

Would she want a public trial in which the reason why Bofors money ended up in Quattrocchi’s Swiss bank accounts may well come out? There can be only one reason why Bofors would pay Quattrocchi and that is because his closeness to Mr and Mrs Rajiv Gandhi may have helped the deal go through.

... contd.