December 30, 2018:
An accused in the alleged Rs 3,600-crore AgustaWestland scam, Michel was extradited from the UAE recently & is currently in the ED’s custody. The agency sought his custody for eight more days on Saturday, & the judge granted a week.
Enforcement Directorate (ED) told a Delhi court Saturday that during questioning in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper case, alleged middle-man Christian Michel had taken “Mrs Gandhi’s” name in reference to a query, & that he had later managed to hand over a follow-up question to his lawyer seeking directions on “what to say”, calling it “a conspiracy to shield or tamper with evidence”.
Appearing before Vacation Judge Chandra Shekhar, the ED’s Special Public Prosecutor, D P Singh, said: “Parson (December 27) inhone Mrs Gandhi ka naam liya tha ek kisi reference mein. Main reference ka naam nahin loonga. To humein follow-up question karna tha ki Mrs Gandhi kaun hai… Medical examination ke time par unhein legal access diya gaya tha ki achaanak ye notice kiya gaya ki unhone kuchch diya hai, jo vakil sahib ne apne jeb mein rakh diya. Jab check kiya gaya to Mrs Gandhi par jo follow-up questions they woh vakil sahib ko slip-in kiye gaye (Day before yesterday, Michel took Mrs Gandhi’s name in some reference. I won’t say in what reference. So we needed to ask him a follow-up question as to who Mrs Gandhi is… He was given legal access during medical examination when suddenly we noticed that he handed over something to his lawyer, who pocketed it. When we checked, we found that the follow-up questions related to Mrs Gandhi had been slipped to the lawyer).”
Claiming “a conspiracy to shield or tamper with evidence”, the prosecutor said this could be revealed from questioning of the accused. Also submitting an incident report on the matter & asking that Michel be denied access to his lawyers, D P Singh said, “Benefits of legal access should be discontinued… He was actually seeking some direction on what to say & also to send word outside on the line of questioning.”
The ED further said that in one of the contract negotiation documents, “it is mentioned ‘son of an Italian lady… Going to be the next PM’… We have to also confront him with these documents… We have to identify the proceeds of the crime. Officials have been paid money near the North Block & we have to identity them… We also need to decipher who the ‘big man’ referred to as ‘R’ is in the communication between Christian Michel & other people. We need to confront Michel with other people to decipher who ‘the big man’ or ‘R’ is.” Source Link
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