Top secret documents of Scorpene, India’s future submarine fleet, have been out in the open for the past several years, according to The Australian, the newspaper which has reported the massive leak.
In a report on Friday, the newspaper gave details of “how the secrets surfaced in Australia” In April 2013.
Begins at DCNS office
The trail begins at the DCNS office in Paris where the data was copied by a subcontractor to DCNS who was a former French Navy officer upt o the early 1970’s and later worked for the private sector.
They are supposed to have taken the data to a South-east Asian country where they worked for a private company and the data remained there after they were sacked from the company.
The company, without realising the sensitive nature of the data, sent to it its head office in Singapore where it was placed on a server on April 18, 2013 but is not known if it is still there. The data was later sent to Australia on a data disk by regular post from Singapore to Sydney in Australia in April 2013.
The person who received the disk in Australia has defence knowledge and understood to have kept the disk locked for over two years. But after DCNS won a bid recently to build 12 submarines for the Australian Navy in a $38 bn deal, he decided to make the information public in “Australia’s interests.”
Plans of surrendering
“He has not broken any laws and the authorities know who he is. He plans to surrender the disk to the government on Monday,” the report states and says he claims to be a whistle-blower.
The report says after the data leak DCNS reasoned that “the most likely scenario was that a commercial competitor was seeking to sabotage the company” and the “obvious suspects” were Germany and Japan who lost out to DCNS in the recent bid.
