The Indian Panorama

Tag: CAG

  • AgustaWestland scam: Ex-Def Secy, four IAF men named in chargesheet

    New Delhi (TIP)-The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in its supplementary chargesheet in the Rs 3,600-crore AgustaWestland scam has named former Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and Defence Secretary Shashi Kant Sharma and four retired Indian Air Force officers, officials in the agency said. The officials said the chargesheet was filed in a special CBI court here after getting the nod from the government to prosecute Sharma, who served as the Defence Secretary between 2011 and 2013 before being appointed the CAG.

    The CBI has also named the then Air Vice Marshal Jasbir Singh Panesar (now retired), deputy chief test pilot SA Kunte, the then Wing Commander Thomas Mathew and Group Captain N Santosh. Kunte and Santosh retired as Air Commodore.

    It is to be noted here that the case pertains to the alleged bribery to swing a deal to procure 12 VVIP helicopters from AgustaWestland, which was ineligible as its helicopters did not meet the 6,000-metre operational ceiling parameter set by the IAF. The need for new helicopters to ferry VVIPs — the President, Prime Minister, Vice-President and Defence Minister — was felt in 1999 when a proposal was moved to find an alternative to the IAF’s Soviet-era Mi8s.

    The CBI, in its first chargesheet filed in in September 2017, had accused then IAF Chief SP Tyagi of recommending reduction in the operational ceiling of the helicopters from 6,000 metres to 4,500 metres, which brought AgustaWestland into the race.

                Source: TNS

  • ‘Indian intelligence service’ bought Pegasus from Israel, coordinated with Mossad: New York Times

    ‘Indian intelligence service’ bought Pegasus from Israel, coordinated with Mossad: New York Times

    NEW DELHI (TIP): The “Indian intelligence service” purchased Pegasus from Israeli company NSO in a deal pegged at “dozens of millions of dollars”, a The New York Times (NYT) reporter involved in the newspaper’s investigation into the use of the surveillance system worldwide has said. The New York Times said the purchase was finalized during the visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Israel and cleared by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2017.

    Describing the NSO procedure for Pegasus, which is a high-grade cyberweapon on Israel’s export control list, The New York Time’s Tel Aviv-based correspondent Ronen Bergman said the Israeli Ministry of Defense had cleared the contract, and that NSO engineers would have had to travel to India to install the system themselves and Israeli intelligence agency Mossad liaised with them. However, neither the NYT nor Mr. Bergman specified whether they meant the Intelligence Bureau (IB) or the Research and Analysis wing ((R&AW), or any other agency reporting to the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) under National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval.

    Mr. Bergman also said that the entity that signed the Pegasus purchase agreement would have had to give three guarantees to the Israeli Ministry of Defense: that it would use it only by itself, that it would get prior written permission to share it with any other entity, and that it would use it Pegasus surveillance against terrorism and organized crime.

    “While the ongoing technical maintenance is done by NSO vis-a-vis, in this case, Indian intelligence service, which was the entity that purchased Pegasus – the overall connection is also with the involvement of the agency in Israel that is in charge of running secret intelligence and political relationships, which is the Mossad,” Mr. Bergman said in an interview to Indian news portal The Wire, which had taken part in the global investigation by several agencies that found thousands of phones belonging to civilians, including politicians, judges, journalists, activists with no criminal record had been hacked using the Pegasus software. Journalists belonging to The Wire, The Hindu and other Indian agencies were also on the list. The Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Home Affairs declined to comment on the New York Times story and the latest interview.

    Last July, in Parliament, IT and Communications Minister Ashwini Vaishnav, whose phone was also on the list of Pegasus- hacked devices, said the news reports were “sensational” and “had no factual basis and were categorically denied by all parties including in the Supreme Court,” referring to an ongoing case in the apex court, which subsequently ordered its own enquiry committee to investigate the allegations against the government. Separately, the Ministry of Defense had said it had “not had any transactions” with the NSO group.

    Significantly, the NSCS had for the first time seen a 10-fold increase in budgetary allocation in 2017-18, when its allocation shot up to ₹333 crore and it was further increased to ₹841.73 crore in 2018-19 but was revised to ₹140.92 crore in 2019-20, and officials did not respond to The Hindu report requesting explanations for the sudden surge in outlay. The functioning of the NSCS, IB and the R&AW are exempted from the provisions of the Right to Information Act (RTI) and also from Parliament scrutiny. The organizations cannot be financially audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) also.

    In the interview, Mr. Bergman offered no evidence of the NYT’s claims, but detailed the workings of NSO and procedure involved by each of the countries, including India, Mexico, Hungary, Morocco, KSA etc., who had purchased the Pegasus program. He said he couldn’t divulge his sources, but The New York Times had conducted an extensive multi-country investigation based on documents that he was privy to. “Some of the details that are specified, this comes from a very sensitive, a long-time dealing with sources, and, therefore, I’ll be a little bit cagey in some of the details… we have been working for a year in 12 different countries, speaking with intelligence officials, with leaders of law enforcement agencies, politicians, leaders, cyber experts, human rights activists, etc. and I think we got as close as possible to the full picture – if not the whole picture,” Mr. Bergman stated.

    As the programme is on a controlled export list, NSO officials have said all their contracts are cleared by the Israeli government. The NYT story had linked the Pegasus purchase in each of the countries to relations between their leaders and Mr. Netanyahu and claimed that those governments had changed their foreign policy, and votes at the United Nations as a result of the relationship.

    “[In] India, [there is] the relationship, a close personal relationship between the leaders of India and Israel that gave birth to, I would say, a new generation of military expenditure as well as a new Indian stand, including international public steps towards Israel,” Mr. Bergman said, adding that according to his sources, there was “a specific interest and specific emphasis from the Indian leadership to the Israeli leadership to obtain that specific license” for Pegasus.

    (Source: The Hindu)

  • CAG on IAF purchases: Rafale reflects the need for major corrections

    CAG on IAF purchases: Rafale reflects the need for major corrections

    The Rafale tender stole the political thunder in the Comptroller and Auditor General of India’s (CAG) assessment of 11 capital acquisitions by the Indian Air Force over a time period that spanned both the UPA and Modi governments. Considering that previous CAG reports on coal and 2G had irrevocably damaged the credibility of the UPA government, the Modi government can consider itself fortunate to have escaped unscathed because of the inventiveness of the auditors. The CAG used a never-used formula (called alignment pricing) to declare the Modi tender cheaper than the UPA era’s now-cancelled 126 aircraft bid. An audit basically evaluates four criteria in a defense platform: quality, cost-effectiveness, delivery and objectivity. The CAG report gives conditional thumbs up on only two: cost-effectiveness and the delivery schedule. Even these are up for debate.

    But the benchmark of objectivity, which includes intangibles such as transparency, fair play and integrity, stands in a grey zone. For instance, the comparison of UPA and NDA-era prices on the basis of a French index is debatable when payments are made in dollars. A dissent note alleging parallel negotiations (dismissed by then Defence Minister Parrikar as an overreaction) went unchallenged, while there was just a mild rap for not signing an integrity pact and succumbing to French refusal on opening an Escrow account. The Modi government was also easily let off the hook for failing to respond to a 20 per cent price cut by a Rafale competitor. Who knows whether Rafale would have still played tough if it had not been the single vendor?

    Rafale was one of the 11 purchases studied by CAG and the common tale that emerges is of overambitious services whose requirements are frequently changed, leading to several vendors dropping out; the contract negotiations committee that rarely establishes the benchmark price, which, in turn, makes it difficult to establish the reasonability of the price. Complex and multi-level approval processes further add to the delays. Overall, the existing capital acquisition system is unlikely to effectively support the IAF in its war preparedness and modernization.

    (Tribune, India)