AgustaWestland is the Anglo-Italian subsidiary of Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica.
The note is addressed to an unidentified person and asks the person to get in touch with the then Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and request him to call “PM Singh” on his behalf. The note says, “Call Monti or (Italian ambassador to Britain) Ambassador Terracciano on my behalf to ask him to call the PM Singh”.
It has been produced by the prosecution as part of its case that the former CEO was highly connected in the Italian power circuit.
In a series of expedited hearings, Italian prosecutors have also built a strong case to debunk the arguments put forward by AgustaWestland that its two contracts with middlemen Haschke and Christian Michel that amounted to a total of 51 million euros were legitimate business proposals and were for engineering consultations, media management in India and buying back defunct choppers from Pawan Hans.
Orsi, Finmeccanica and AgustaWestland have all maintained that no bribes were paid and that all payments made to the alleged middlemen are valid transactions.
The plea bargain by Haschke, that will likely be agreed by the court on April 11, comes after several key witnesses told the court that payments made to the middlemen appear to be illegitimate and are not backed by any evidence that legitimate work was carried out against them.
The prosecution has produced several financial experts, including inspectors from the Italian national bank who have gone through the payments made by AgustaWestland to Haschke and Michel.
In the court on Wednesday and Thursday, the financial experts, it is learnt, said there is no paper trail or link or any evidence to prove that actual work was carried out by the middlemen for AgustaWestland in return for the payments.
The bills and invoices that had been cleared by the company were allegedly found to be mostly fictitious.
Also, the prosecution has claimed that it was highly unusual for the CEO of the company to personally clear payments to consultants.
The prosecutors had also asked Haschke in court in January if the abbreviation ‘AP' in a “budget sheet” said to belong to the middlemen was a reference to Sonia's key aide Ahmed Patel.
