CBI to move application for withdrawal of Bofors case on Oct 3

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) will formally move an application before the Magistrates Court in Delhi on Saturday withdrawing the cases against Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi in the Bofors Gun Deal, the Union Law Minister has said.

"The government has taken a decision for withdrawal of the cases and the Public Prosecutor, on behalf of the CBI, will move an application before the Magistrate's Court on October 3," M Veerappa Moily said in an interview.

The minister, who is here at the invitation of the British Government, said that since a PIL (Public Interest Litigation) was pending before the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General thought it fit that it should be brought to the notice of the Apex Court.

Moily, himself an eminent lawyer, pointed out that Justice JD Kapoor, Judge of the Delhi High Court on February 4, 2004, had quashed all charges under the Prevention of Corruption Act and Bribery under the Penal Code in the Bofors case.

The judgment exonerated the late Rajiv Gandhi, former Prime Minister and SK Bhatnagar, the Defence Secretary during the period.

Judge Kapoor observed that the charges were "framed purely on the basis of irrelevant inferences, presumptions, surmises, conjectures and through riotous imagination by even introducing personal knowledge of facts which were not set up by the CBI little realising that criminal trials cannot proceed nor can succeed on such premises without there being any material or evidence corroborating those inferences."