Bofors deal: BJP demands PM's apology

A day after the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) said more than Rs 41 crore was paid as kickbacks to Ottavio Quattrocchi in the Bofors gun deal, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) demanded an apology from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for earlier giving a clean-chit to the Italian national.

Another round of scathing attack against the Union government also came from the politburo of the CPI(M), which demanded that the case should not just be reinvestigated but the findings of ITAT had also confirmed a high level of corruption involved in the gun deal.

“We want to know, will the prime minister apologise to the nation in view of the findings of the ITAT? The BJP demands that both the PM and Congress President Sonia Gandhi should reply why the Congress government unabashedly tried to bail him out at every stage of investigation. It is too well-known that Quattrocchi was very close to the Gandhi family,” said Ravi Shankar Prasad, the BJP spokesperson.