A city court hearing the AgustaWestland helicopter deal case on Saturday placed curbs on alleged middleman Christian Michel’s access to legal assistance after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) complained that the accused had misused the permission by passing on to his counsel a paper that contained a set of questions on “Mrs. Gandhi”.
The court extended Mr. Michel’s custody for seven more days and restricted his access to legal counsel by allowing his lawyers to meet him one at a time, from “a distance” for a maximum of 15 minutes, twice a day.
Earlier, moving its plea for extension of Mr. Michel’s custody, the ED said at about 5 p.m. on December 27, when a medical team had come to conduct a mandatory check-up, the accused had quietly slipped a note to counsel Aljo Joseph while ostensibly shaking his hand.
Follow-up questions
A Deputy Director of the agency, who had been recording Mr. Michel’s statement, noticed the incident and asked Mr. Joseph to give the piece of paper back.
The ED officials found that the paper had a list of follow-up questions that were yet to be posed to Mr. Michel on ‘Mrs. Gandhi’. “The paper was lying on a table in the same room, which he managed to get hold of and handed over to the counsel,” said an official. The questions are based on the documents gathered by the ED during the probe so far.
Alleging that there was a conspiracy to either shield or tamper with the evidence that could be brought forth from Mr. Michel’s questioning, the ED urged that permission to the accused for legal access be discontinued.
The agency also said Mr. Michel’s further examination was needed to get details of the “dubious” means adopted by him in various instances, such as the modus operandi allegedly employed by him to eliminate Tata and HAL from competition in an Italian deal; measures taken to mask the AgustaWestland deal as a British one; and his alleged role in a “German deal”.
Asserting that it had found evidence related to some new entities that were used for laundering the funds in question, the ED submitted that apart from unearthing the entire money trail, it wanted to confront Mr. Michel with his Indian associates, identified so far, and take him to the places that were used as hideouts or for paying bribes. It added that the accused had not been cooperating and was taking a lot of time in writing answers to its questions.
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