Cong, BJP trade charges over Agusta chopper deal

Jaipur: The Congress and BJP state units continued to trade charges over the AgustaWestland chopper deal for the second day on Friday.
In a fresh allegation, state Congress president Sachin Pilot claimed that the Vasundhara Raje government paid Rs 7 crore premium to buy a second helicopter from AgustaWestland in 2008. BJP state president Ashok Parnami later challenged Pilot to either prove that any amount of money was paid in 2008 or apologise to the people.
The Congress leader, at a press conference here, claimed that the Raje-government wanted to buy a 17-seater AW139 chopper in 2008 even though its first deal with the same company in 2005 caused a loss of Rs 1.14 crore to the exchequer, which was detected by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in 2008-09.Pilot said the second helicopter deal that was initiated at an inflated price of Rs 59 crore could not materialise as Raje lost the assembly election few months later.
The PCC chief demanded that the ongoing CBI probe into the AgustaWestland deals should be widened to include the VVIP chopper deals of the Raje-government. "If there can be a CBI investigation into a helicopter deal that was cancelled by the Government of India, why cannot there be a probe into a chopper deal that actually went through in the state?" asked Pilot.
The Congress leader stressed that the UPA-II cancelled the VVIP helicopter deal, blacklisted the company and handed over the investigations to the CBI when the irregularities surfaced. "State BJP says there was no irregularity in the 2005 deal. So why should it have a problem if the ongoing CBI probe's scope is widened to include the Raje-government's deal too," the PCC chief said. BJP state president Parnami reacted by saying that Pilot should prove that premium was paid or publicly apologise for making baseless allegations. "Neither any helicopter was purchased nor any premium was paid in 2008. The truth is that the PCC chief is telling lies every day just to divert attention from corruption allegations against his party leader Sonia Gandhi," Parnami said in a statement released in the evening.
The BJP leader asked, "Why no CBI probe was ordered when there were Congress governments at the Centre and the state? If the Congress was not satisfied with the state assembly's public accounts committee's clean chit on the Rs 1.14 crore expenditure, why was it allowed to be presented in the House in 2013?"
Pilot, on the other hand, reasoned that the state assembly's committee or the CAG were not investigative agencies. "The Raje-government should face a CBI investigation. Instead of the BJP state president defending it, the government should speak up for itself," he said.