Six years after India signed the Rs 1,150-crore Barak missile deal with an Israeli company, the CBI has registered an FIR naming former Defence Minister George Fernandes, his colleague and former Samata Party president Jaya Jaitly, the then Chief of Naval Staff Sushil Kumar and former Samata Party treasurer R K Jain.

Investigating 48 Defence deals cleared during the BJP-led NDA government, the CBI made its first move today, searching 35 premises of six suspected middlemen who, it alleged, gobbled crores in Defence deals. The agency also alleged that former Admiral S M Nanda’s son Suresh Nanda bribed Samata Party functionaries to get George Fernandes’s signature on the Barak deal.

The FIR on the Barak deal stated that Suresh Nanda paid Rs 2 crore to Jaya Jaitly at George Fernandes’s house to get the NDA government’s signature on a contract for seven Barak Anti-Missile (AMD) Systems and 200 missiles from M/s Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd (IAI). The deal, the FIR said, was done in haste and despite the DRDO’s objection. The then DRDO chief, the FIR said, had recommended the indigenous Trishul for the Navy. Suresh Nanda, the FIR alleged, also paid several lakh of rupees to former Samata Party treasurer R K Jain to influence the then Defence Minister’s decision.

Reacting to the CBI move, Fernandes told The Indian Express: “If I am being accused, then there should be an FIR against the current President of the country as well. I took his advice at the time when he was scientific advisor (to then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee) and on his clearance it was done. It was my duty to meet the Navy’s needs. This is political vendetta of the worst kind.”

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