Diabetes challenges 400 million people around the world a number expected to double in twenty years. These are the known patients that are banked and insured not those that occupy conflict zones or are fleeing from genocide on boats bobbing in the Andaman Sea.
India has world-class treatment for diabetes and is a destination for global patients. Unless the patient is an accused money launderer who layered $30 million in bribe money into the country for a UK helicopter company to be awarded a $750 million contract at a price 30% greater than its American competitor in a deal that began in 2003.
$750 million would provide income to 375,000 citizens for one year which might be more important than ferrying the hind and other quarters of elevated thinkers who might otherwise differ. The American helicopters were offered at $250 million less, without the bribe, or the cost of 125,000 jobs. That the helicopters, twelve, required any bribes at all insulted the intelligence if not the sensibilities of an Air Force that appeared to need help from the born right in deciding matters of national security.
Federal warrants were issued for Mr Gupta's presence in August 2020 for investigation of the bribes. A state court had been waiting for Mr Gupta since 2012 in the matter of a real estate development which cost the state exchequer at least $50 million.
In December 2020 Mr Gupta applied to have the federal warrant canceled, claiming that he required treatment in London for diabetes, blood clots, and breathlessness presumably from Indian doctors in London and not Indian doctors in Delhi. The judge, in Delhi, was not convinced and rejected the application.
The investigators would like to talk to Mr Gupta's about the 500 subsidiaries of his businesses, with names like Interstellar and Matrix, that obscured $30 million of bribes in a blizzard of paper and balmy jurisdictions. Mr. Gupta's testimony has been preceded by a colorful cast of at least ten characters from European middlemen to extradited Dubai money money launderers.
These gentlemen confirmed a trail of money that started at a chance meeting at an Italian wedding between the middleman and the family of an Indian Air Force Chief at the time that a decision had been made by the Indian Government to buy $750 million worth of helicopters to transport the political elite. The middlemen sought out the UK helicopter company which advanced the bribe money to be distributed to the decision-makers through old-fashioned cash and new-fangled consulting contract for engineering services never provided by ghost engineers.
The middlemen and other suspects could not have known that a 2011 boardroom dispute at the UK Helicopter parent company, an Italian Defence Company, would result in good old fashioned blackmail with the Italian CEO arrested and investigators stumbling on a diary kept by one of the middlemen. Yes, no honor among thieves who, despite being Italian, must have missed the entire Godfather series and kept diaries. An American lawyer in April of 2012 wrote an inconvenient series of letters to Indian Agencies about an escrow account held by a previous middleman in a previous deal, submarines, that was somehow linked to helicopters. The rest of the tale tumbled out after Italian courts investigated.
In the meantime Mr Gupta partnered with the largest real estate firm in Dubai to build malls and appointed two of the middlemen to the board of directors in 2009. Mr Gupta, it seemed, was on a family errand. His wife was offspring of one of those political families to whom others refer to in hushed tones and stolen glances. That family was one step removed from the family that had inherited political responsibility from the equivalent of the founding fathers and appeared to be doing its best to insure full employment in European defense manufacturers.
Mr Gupta sought colonial refuge in the UK along with Mr. Mallya, Mr. Bhandari, Mr Nirav Modi, and assuredly others who have done their best to repair the deposit health of the UK banking system as it prepares for separation from Europe. They appear to have been welcomed with open arms, checkbooks, and extradition proceedings that proceed apace on the other side of a glacial midnight.
While high tea was served in London at the Savoy Indian soldiers, outmanned and outgunned, plunged to their death on a border with China that held in 1962 only because President Kennedy assured Prime Minister Nehru that the US fleet was on the way and President Kennedy called Chairman Mao and told him to knock it off. The corruption of the defense contracting process has assured that the forces today have half the required Air Force squadrons to police an uncomfortable neighborhood.
Mr Gupta newly resident in the UK might be prescribed medicine by the UK Hospital from a batch of recently recalled blood clot medicine in which Torrent Pharmaceutical mistakenly mixed antidepressant combinations with that of erectile dysfunction. There is no telling what the outcome might be to Mr Gupta's breathlessness though he may be able to join an impromptu clinical trial.
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