09 Dec 16. A former Indian Air Force chief, Air Chief Marshal Shashindra Pal Tyagi, was arrested on Friday by the Central Bureau of Investigation for alleged corruption in the purchase of 12 AW 101 VVIP helicopters from AgustaWestland, a subsidiary of Italy’s Leonardo-Finmeccanica.
Along with Tyagi, Delhi based lawyer Gautam Khaitan and his cousin Sanjeev Tyagi also were arrested, “on the allegations accepting illegal gratification for exercising influence through corrupt and/or illegal means,” according to the government.
In January 2014, MoD officials canceled the €546 million helicopter contract inked in 2010 with the Anglo-Italian company on charges of corruption, referring the case to the CBI.
India’s Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar, during a debate in Parliament in April this year, said the request for proposals for the deal had been diverted to favor AgustaWestland.
“The technical specifications were changed – especially the altitude of the helicopters from 6000 meters to 4500 meters, and raising the cockpit height of the desired helicopters to 1.8 meters was only meant to favour AW 101 helicopter of AgustaWestland,” Parrikar said then.
In April of this year, a civil court in Milan had indicted some senior officials of Leonardo-Finmeccanica, convicting them in the helicopter scam. Without mentioning names, Parrikar told parliament on April 4 that an “invisible” hand had been behind the VVIP helicopter scam, thereby suggesting that top leadership of the opposition Congress Party (in power in 2010) could be involved. A MoD official said the CBI continues investigation in the VVIP helicopter case, adding that there is no proposal yet before the government to blacklist either AgustaWestland or the mother company Leonardo-Finmeccanica. Between 2005 and 2012, defense companies, including Singapore Technologies Kinetics, Israel Military Industries (IMI), Rheinmetall Air Defence AG of Switzerland and Corporation Defence of Russia were banned from doing defense business in India for the next 10 years on charges of alleged corruption. In 2005, Denel of South Africa was blacklisted. Last month MoD has issued fresh guidelines on blacklisting and has reduced the maximum period of banning from 10 to five years. (Source: Defense News)
08 Dec 16. As the 114th Congress comes to a close, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) has cleared five notifications of weapon sales to Congress, including Chinook helicopters for Saudi Arabia, Apache helicopters for the United Arab Emirates and TOW missiles for Morocco.
If completed, the five sales would have a cumulative total of $7.9bn. More notably, today pushes DSCA’s notification total to just less than $41.8bn through the first two-and-a-half months of fiscal 2017. While notifications to Congress are not guarantees of sales, that number already dwarfs the $33.6bn sales figure that DSCA announced it completed in fiscal 2016, and it would mean the US is on track to easily shatter the record $46.6 bn in sales cleared in 2015. That massive number for the year is driven primarily by two sizable sales of fighter jets to Qatar (F-15s, for $21.1 bn) and Kuwait (F/A-18E/F models, for $10.1 bn), but days such as Thursday stand on their own as good news for American arms makers.
The five sales notified to Congress include:
• Saudi Arabia has been cleared to purchase 48 CH-47 Chinook cargo helicopters, produced by Boeing, as well as 112 engines, 58 AN/AAR-57 Common Missile Warning Systems, 48 M240H 7.62mm machine guns and other assorted equipment. The expected cost is $3.51bn, primarily going to Boeing and Honeywell.
• The UAE has been cleared to purchase 28 AH-64E remanufactured Apache Attack Helicopters and nine new AH-64E Apache attack helicopters, along with assorted parts and equipment. The estimated sale total would be $3.5bn, with Boeing and Lockheed Martin as the primary contractors. While offsets will be part of the final package, the notification says the “offsets are n