Fraud

The row about the Tatra trucks gets more and more weird ..

For some time now, it has seemed that all of you have to do is to make an allegation about anything, and when there is an investigation, there does seem to be something wrong. Call this endemic of the amount of corruption that is present in Government, and which nobody tries to take any steps to prevent. The army is still one of the more respected institutions of the country, but one is starting to feel that the defense sector (not the army specifically, but the entire wing of the Government dealing with defense) is as corrupt as any other arm of the Government. The Minister in charge, AK Antony has no allegations of corruption against him personally, but just like his boss, the Prime Minister (who also has a reputation of honesty), just being personally honest is not enough. You have to enforce the same thing in your area of responsibility, else you are as liable as if you were personally corrupt yourself. Antony is now starting to come under a cloud because he does not seem to have done too much to weed out the corruption present within the defense sector. Antony over the past few years has black-listed firms that have done indulged in corruption when dealing with the Ministry of Defense, but these actions have not been deep nor have they done anything to stop the stench of corruption in this area.
Consider the case of the Tatra trucks. These are trucks that are used by the army extensively for transporting anything from equipment to missiles to other stuff. The army gets these trucks from BEML, but they originally come from a company owned by an Indian origin person, Ravi Rishi. When the army chief made the controversial allegation that he was offered a bribe of 14 crores for allowing the supply of these trucks, there was a firestorm of controversy. The Army Chief had apparently carried on this complaint to the Defense Minister, but there was no further action by either the Minister or the Army Chief. The Army chief was negligent in not pushing for an investigation, but the Defense Minister was criminally negligent for not handing the matter over for investigation at that time, rather than pushing for a CBI investigation when the matter came to the media.
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Finally the Congress Government agrees for a JPC, could have taken this action long time back

The whole winter session of Parliament was made useless over the controversy about getting a JPC in place for investigating the 2G scam. The Government was adamant over its refusal, making light of the efforts of the various opposition parties in demanding the JPC; the Prime Minister even claimed that he was ready to answer any queries posed by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of Parliament. It took some time to puncture that claim, with the PAC finally revealing that forget the Prime Minister, they cannot even call a Minister. All they can do is look at records and call officials (which they have started doing, having interesting meetings where they called the CBI chief, the RBI Governor, and so on – trying to come up with challenges to the front presented by the Government). There was intense speculation that the Prime Minister was evading the JPC since it has the power to question him, and it would be very embarrassing for him to answer the series of questions of why he stood by while A Raja was changing policies to favor a set of corporates and give them a precious natural resource, the 2G spectrum. That Manmohan Singh has no good answers to these questions is very apparent when he gave the interview to newspaper editors and made the acknowledgement that for the sake of keeping the coalition going, there are compromises that need to be made. When the JPC (even one where a Congress MP is the head) asks these questions, what will the PM say ?
So, finally the Congress has accepted that it is far more embarrassing for them if Parliament does not function, especially when the Budget session is underway, and hence the concession by the Government that a JPC will be setup. The opposition parties seemed determined to prevent Parliament from functioning, a rather extreme step, but then in the 2G scam, the Government has only acted when forced to do so.
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The BCCI (Board of Control for Cricket) loses in court against 2 IPL teams

The BCCI (the cricket board of India) considers itself all powerful, and with its commercial success and huge monetary balances, it also has a lot of powerful political patronage (after all, the all powerful Union Minister Sharad Pawar is in charge of the cricket body). And, goaded by competition from Subash Chandra’s ICL, the BCCI set up its own version of the T20 championship, the IPL. The IPL was stewarded by Lalit Modi, and he set it up as an incredible money making machine, earning huge money for the BCCI. Of course, when somebody makes such a successful machine, they also tend to get corrupted themselves, and so Lalit Modi allegedly has his own stake in the various transactions done as part of the BCCI (such as the various companies used for advertising and media deals), and also in multiple teams that take part in the IPL.
When finally things came to a head, in the debate over setting up a new IPL team, there was a conflict in interest between Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi, and an open confrontation between them took the scalp of Shashi Tharoor; and when a minister goes, there are consequences; one of the most important consequences was that it was also time for Lalit Modi to go. And so, many of his offences were detailed out, and he was railroaded out (even though the Board was equally culpable for the various acts and omissions). As a part of investigations, the Board also wanted to go against teams where Lalit Modi was involved in some ways (lot of speculation that Lalit Modi had interests in the Rajasthan and Chandigarh teams !), and so, it was speculated that the board would take some action against these teams.
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