Indian business intermediary Sushen Gupta earned a reputation as a highly influential and highly paid middleman in the aeronautics and defence sectors, notably concerning his role in helping to broker the 7.8-billion-euro sale by France to India of 36 Rafale fighter jets, inked in an inter-governmental agreement in 2016.
For his services in that deal, which included obtaining confidential information from the Indian defence ministry, he received millions of euros in commissions from Rafale manufacturer Dassault Aviation and French electronic defence systems firm Thales.
The payments to Gupta and the controversial background to the fighter deal were detailed in Mediapart’s three-part ‘Rafale Papers’ investigation published in April.
As Indian news agency IANS* has reported, a corruption probe led by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India’s principal law enforcement agency, found that the Gupta family business – previously managed by Sushen Gupta’s father – had made payments to retired Indian army Lieutenant General Balraj Takhar and his daughter Nimrata. The latter received a payment of 49,500 US dollars from a shell company registered in Mauritius Island, the same through which Gupta received secret commissions on arms contracts, including millions of euros in payments from Dassault Aviation.
Mediapart has now obtained documents from official Indian investigations which both confirm and add to the information report by IANS. According to these, Nimrata Takhar also received payments transferred from bank accounts registered in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai and in Indonesia. Bank statements relating to the transfers indicated they were for consultancy services that appear questionable, while one allegedly fake invoice is suspected of being drawn up by a legal firm acting for Sushen Gupta.
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Balraj Takhar and his daughter Nimrata firmly deny any wrongdoing, and neither face any charges at this stage of the investigations in India.
Questioned separately by Mediapart by phone, Balraj Takhar and his daughter confirmed the existence of some of the payments, and that the former lieutenant general had asked Sushen Gupta to make payments to his daughter to provide her and her children with financial help. However, they gave contradictory explanations about the services for which the remunerations were made (see the ‘Boîte Noire’ section at the bottom of this page).
Meanwhile, Gupta faces charges of “money laundering” in a joint investigation by Indian enforcement agencies into a scandal dubbed “Choppergate”, which centres on a 550-million-euro contract for the sale to India of helicopters manufactured by the Italian-British firm AgustaWestland. The CBI is investigating suspected corruption in the deal, alongside India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), a government agency tasked with fighting economic crime and notably money laundering.
The probes by the two agencies found that Sushen Gupta received secret commissions from AgustaWestland, and also from Dassault, which were paid into a shell company in Mauritius Island called Interstellar Technologies. Investigation of the payments made by Dassault appear to have been sidelined (see more on this in Mediapart’s previous investigation here).
Sushen Gupta and his brother Sushant run a family consultancy business specialised in the aeronautics and defence sector and which was previously headed by their father, Dev Gupta, who handed it over to them during the last decade.
The Gupta’s relationship with Balraj Takhar dates from when the latter was a serving lieutenant general in charge of the Indian Army’s Southern Command, one of six regional military structures. Their closeness with Takhar was such that they addressed him affectionately as “Balli Uncle”.
Soon after retiring in 2006, Takhar was hired by Dev Gupta to manage the Gupta family’s property business in India, and also their coffee plantation in the south-west state of Kerala. While such activities may appear to have little in common with Takhar’s military skills, he told Mediapart: “I am agriculture friendly, I have the skills from my own land. I was cultivating my own land while in the army.”
He firmly denies being hired by the Gupta’s for his contacts and influence within the Indian military. “I have no contacts or influence and I have no appointments held in the Indian army dealt with equipments [sic],” he said on the phone to Mediapart, adding that he was never involved in any military contract for the Gupta’s and that his only role was “looking after the coffee estate and real estate in India. No other concern”.
In computer accounting files belonging to Sushen Gupta and seized by the Enforcement Directorate, there are traces of 28 payments made between 2007 and 2016 totalling 250,000 dollars and which are presented as being linked to “Balli Uncle”.
Among these sums suspected of being payments, 47,500 dollars are indicated in the accounting files as being issued by the now-dissolved Interstellar Technologies company in Mauritius Island, into which Dassault and AgustaWestland had paid commissions.
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In his replies to Mediapart, Takhar did not comment on what appear as possible payments made by Interstellar, but did say that he knows nothing about the company. He added that he personally received none of the other payments indicated in the Gupta accounts referred to by Mediapart, and which indeed may have served to finance the property business operations of the Gupta family. “I am working as a consultant, I have a monthly salary, yes,” he told Mediapart. “And I pay taxes on the salary.”
The Indian investigators appear to have been particularly interested in the payments made to Takhar’s daughter Nimrata. Married to a Wall Street banker, she lives in New York and ceased professional activity around 15 years ago. According to the two official Indian investigation case files, Nimrata Takhar is suspected of having received 78,500 dollars from Sushen Gupta. Of that total, 49,500 dollars were paid by Interstellar Technologies between 2008 and 2012, which the bank transfer documents indicate was for consultancy services provided by her to the shell company.
In the case of one of these payments, Indian investigators have called into question the reality of such work. On January 10th 2019, the executive secretary of OP Khaitan, a legal firm working for Sushen Gupta, sent an order by email to Interstellar Technologies for the payment to Nimrata Takhar of 15,000 dollars. Attached to the email was an invoice for the same amount, apparently prepared and signed by Nimrata Takhar, for “consultancy services rendered towards various projects”.
However, one of OP Khaitan’s staff told CBI investigators that this was a “fake invoice” which, he said, had been drawn up and signed by the executive secretary of the legal firm as he had been asked to do by its boss, lawyer Gautam Khaitan.
When he was questioned for the first time in March 2019 by India’s anti-money laundering and financial crime agency, the Enforcement Directorate, Balraj Takhar said of his daughter that, “whenever she came to India, she used to work as a consultant” for the Gupta family’s holding company, DMG Finance & Investment. Questioned by Mediapart, the retired lieutenant general said that this happened “only once”, when “she did consultancy work to do their office designing and doing their offices”.
Contacted by Mediapart, Nimrata Takhar firmly denied having worked for Sushen Gupta. "Not at all,” she insisted. “I live in the US, I have nothing to do with Mr. Sushen Gupta. I have met him once or twice in my life, I don’t live in India, so there is no chance of me providing any consulting. I worked in fashion, so I have nothing to do with what Mr. Gupta does.” She also said she had no knowledge of the suspected invoice that was allegedly prepared by the legal firm working for Gupta.
She separately told both the CBI and Mediapart that the money she received from Sushen Gupta was sent at the request of her father because she had “financial constraints”.
During questioning on August 7th 2019 by the CBI, on the same day as his daughter, Balraj Takhar confirmed that account. “I requested Sushen Gupta and his father Dev Gupta to help me for supporting my daughter financially,” he told the CBI.
He also detailed to the CBI that a fourth payment was made to his daughter by Gupta in November 2018. The date corresponds with a payment of 9,462 dollars transferred from a bank account in Indonesia belonging to a company called Kapline Global, and which was indicated as being an “invoice payment”. Asked by Mediapart, Nimrata Takhar has denied receiving the money.
The Enforcement Directorate also discovered two emails, one from 2012 and the other from 2014, in which Sushen Gupta asked for the transfer of another 19,000 dollars to be made from Dubai to Nimrata Takhar. Here too, she has denied to Mediapart receiving the money.
Apart from Sushen Gupta, Balraj Takhar’s daughter had another benefactor, named Jugwinder Brar, an Indian businessman based in Dubai where he owns a maritime shipping company called Prime Tankers.
A keen golf player, Jugwinder Brar lives in a neighbourhood where houses can cost the equivalent of up to 2 million euros. He drives a Rolls-Royce, and is such an esteemed client of the luxury marque that the Dubai dealership organised a special event for his birthday which it posted on Facebook (see below).
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According to banking records, Brar paid a total of 63,794 dollars to Balraj Takhar’s daughter between 2017 and 2020. Of that total, 44, 891 dollars were transferred from his personal bank accounts in Dubai and India, and were marked up as being for “family maintenance”, while Brar’s company Prime Tankers sent 18, 903 dollars from its account in Dubai, justified as “payment of staff salary”.
Nimrata Takhar, who continues to reside in New York, firmly denied having worked for Prime Tankers. “My father does some consultancy work for that company […] from time to time, and I think he asked them,” she told Mediapart. “I am currently going through a divorce, so I needed some money, and he asked him to deduct [the payments] from his salary.”
In an email response to questions submitted by Mediapart, Jugwinder Brar said that “Nimrata is more than a family [sic] to me”. He added that he had “hired” her, but when informed of her denial of this he offered no comment.
“Mr Jugwinder Brar is a family member,” said Balraj Takhar in his written response to Mediapart’s questions. “I had asked him also to help out my daughter. Since my daughter has never worked, she had to be helped out from time to time.” Both the retired lieutenant general and Jugwinder Brar declined to detail the nature of their family ties.
Balraj Takhar said that a large part of the information presented by Mediapart was “incorrect”, adding that the only aim of this report was to “ruin my reputation of 43 years of service in the Army”.
“There is nothing that has been done by me which is against the rules and regulations,” he insisted. “I am NOT an arms dealer. I have no background of arms [sic]. Please leave us alone.”
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The French version of this report can be found here.
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