India angle in Bofors cropped up by accident, says Swedish ‘Deep Throat’, who has now identified himself. Excerpts from Sten Lindstrom’s interview to Chitra Subramaniam-Duella, from thehoot.org
In 1987, former Swedish police head Sten Lindstrom shared key information with journalist Chitra Subramaniam-Duella (The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Statesman) on the Bofors-India deal. Twenty-five years on, Lindstrom identifies himself as he goes back to the case with Subramaniam-Duella.
In 1987, former Swedish police head Sten Lindstrom shared key information with journalist Chitra Subramaniam-Duella (The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Statesman) on the Bofors-India deal. Twenty-five years on, Lindstrom identifies himself as he goes back to the case with Subramaniam-Duella.
Why did you decide to identify yourself now?
Twenty-five years is a good landmark. We have had some time for reflection. Now it is time to speak again. Corruption levels in the world are increasing... In a world of shrinking resources and ruthless ambition, we have to ensure that survival instincts that brought us out of the caves do not push us back in there because of a few greedy people. I hope I can contribute to the global struggle against corruption by sharing what I know.
Tell us something about yourself.
Like many Swedes of my generation, my wife Eva and I were raised in the best traditions of social democracy. Equity and justice for all is something we hold dear and for which we have [striven] as a nation.
...In my long career as a police officer I have seen many things. What was shocking in the whole Bofors-India saga was the scale of political involvement in Sweden breaking all rules including those we set for ourselves. Bofors was a wake-up call for most Swedes who thought corruption happens only far away in Africa, South America and Asia. There was disbelief and hurt when they found that some of their top politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen were no better than others. The $1.3 billion deal with India for the sale of 410 field howitzers, and a supply contract almost twice that amount, was the biggest arms deal ever in Sweden. Money marked for development projects was diverted to secure this contract at any cost. Rules were flouted, institutions were bypassed and honest Swedish officials and politicians were kept in the dark. Our former Prime Minister Olof Palme was talking peace, disarmament and sustainable development globally, while we were selling arms illegally, including to countries that were on our banned list. My office, the office of Hans Ekblom, the public prosecutor in Stockholm, our National Audit Bureau — everything was ignored. So was the Swedish taxpayer.
The managing director of Bofors, Martin Ardbo, had worked very hard for this deal. He brought over 900 jobs to Karlskoga where Bofors is headquartered for at least a decade. When the stories started appearing, Ardbo was a shaken man. He knew that I knew that he had made a political payment even more secretly than the rest to close this deal. He told me he didn’t have a choice.
How did the India angle in Bofors crop up?
It was an accident. We were conducting several search and seize operations [on] the premises of Bofors and their executives. I have some experience in this area, so I asked my team to take everything they could find. In the pile [was] one set of documents to Swiss banks with instructions that the name of the recipient should be blocked out. An accountant doing his job asked why anonymity was necessary since the payments were legal. Bofors was unable to explain and then we found more and more documents leading to India...
...Looking back, what would you say are some of the lessons learnt?
There are several, but I could mention a few. The role of the whistleblower is a part of democracy. When all official channels are clogged, you have to take a decision. We have a culture here that it is okay to blow the whistle... I knew what I was doing when I leaked the documents to you. I could not count on my government or Bofors or the government of India to get to the bottom of this. My only option was to leak the documents to someone we could trust.
There needs to be a free and fair discussion in the media about itself. The media is the watchdog of our society — but who is watching the media? Most whistleblowers around the world leak information to the media because they feel they owe it to their country, their job or the position they are elected to.
Genuine whistleblowers also expect the media to be responsible and according to me this means that the media has to understand the motives of whistleblowers... Every role has its limits. I cannot become a journalist, a journalist cannot become a judge, and a judge cannot become a politician. Who controls the media, what are their interests? What happens if a reporter is also part of the management? Do journalistic ethics compete with business and political interests of the media organisation? Can an ombudsman be the answer? If not, let us all work together globally to find a solution we all respect and understand.
There is also a lot of debate in the world about the role of middlemen in arms deals. Some say they should not exist at all, others say they have a role. I believe they have a role insofar as marketing a product is concerned and they should be remunerated accordingly in a transparent way so that the cost to the buyer is not circulated as kickbacks. Where it becomes illegal and dangerous is when the ambit of their work includes paying politicians and bureaucrats and in some cases journalists to push their product...
Tell us something about those days, people’s reactions, your difficulties.
People in Sweden were shell-shocked. Bo G Andersson of the Dagens Nyhetter (DN), Burje Remdahl and Jan Mosander of the Swedish Radio are investigative journalists of repute. They were exposing illegal sales of arms to eastern Europe, the Middle East, even Vietnam through Australia. There was total disbelief in Karlskoga. The Indian deal was the straw that broke the camel’s back because it showed that corruption had reached right to the top in Sweden and in India... There was no evidence of any bribe being paid to Palme, but he and some of his ministers knew exactly what was going on.
A quarter century later, any reflections on why Rajiv Gandhi’s name came up?
There was no evidence that he had received any bribe. But he watched the massive cover-up in India and Sweden and did nothing. Many Indian institutions were tarred, innocent people were punished while the guilty got away. The evidence against Ottavio Quattrrocchi was conclusive. Through a front company called AE Services, bribes paid by Bofors landed in Quattrocchi’s account which he subsequently cleaned out because India said there was no evidence linking him to the Bofors deal. Nobody in Sweden or Switzerland was allowed to interrogate him.
[Proceedings against Quattrocchi have been dropped, his accounts de-frozen, after the Delhi High Court accepted the CBI’s plea to drop its case against him.]
Ardbo was terrified about this fact becoming public. He had hidden it even from his own marketing director, Hans Ekblom, who said marketing middlemen had a role, but not political payments... As the stories began to appear, Ardbo knew what I knew. He had written in his notes that… at no cost could the identity of Q (Quattrocchi) be revealed because of his closeness to R (Rajiv Gandhi). He had also mentioned a meeting between an AE Services official and a Gandhi trustee lawyer in Geneva. This was a political payment. These payments are made when the deal has to be inked and all the numbers are on the table. I spent long hours interrogating Ardbo.
What was your experience with the Indian investigators?
The only team I met in early 1990 damaged the seriousness of my work and the media investigation. I met them on a courtesy call. They were in the process of filing a letter rogatory (LR) in Switzerland. Without an official request from Switzerland, Sweden could not intervene. They gave me a list of names to pursue including the name of Amitabh Bachchan. They also told me they did not trust you entirely because you had refused to link the Bachchans to the kickbacks. During that trip to Sweden, the Indian investigators planted the Bachchan angle on DN. The Bachchans took them to court in the UK and won. DN had to apologise and they said the story had come from Indian investigators. I was disappointed with the role of many senior journalists and politicians during that period. They muddied the waters.
After the LR was lodged in Switzerland, I was waiting for the official track with India and Switzerland to begin. It never did. Whenever the public prosecutor Ekblom and I heard of any Indian visits to Stockholm, we would speak to the media expressing our desire to meet them. Can you imagine a situation where no one from India met the real investigators of the gun deal? That was when we saw the extent to which everyone was compromised. Many politicians who had come to my office claiming they would move heaven and earth to get at the truth if they came to power, fell silent when they held very important positions directly linked to the deal.
Any final thoughts?
There cannot be final thoughts on something like this. False closures of corruption bleed the system. Every day has to matter. When something like the scale and violence of Bofors happens, you begin to question your own faith as a professional and a human being. When you start losing faith, you begin to lose hope. When hope is lost, everything is lost. We cannot afford to let that happen. Maybe we will get nowhere, but silence cannot be the answer.
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