When LK Advani apologised to Sonia Gandhi after Gurumurthy’s wild accusations

Two things stand out about LK Advani. He is one of the most decent and honourable persons in the higher levels of Indian politics. He is also a bad judge of people, and this is best reflected in his choice of advisors. Probably the closest to him among them is the Madras-based chartered accountant and corporate lobbyist S Gurumurthy—an RSS activist and no-holds-barred antagonist of the Congress.

There are many others who are viscerally opposed to the Congress party's style of government and what it represents. But Gurumurthy is one of those to whom the end justifies any means. These means are often ethically and even legally unsound. This penchant has often got him into trouble, but his place in Advani's innermost circle has, almost always, remained unchanged.

On February 8 this year, the BJP released a rather grandiloquently but grammatically inelegant document titled ‘Indian Black Money Abroad in Secret Banks and Tax Havens: Second Report of the Task Force’ on the steps to be taken by India. The task force presumably comprises the authors listed, namely S Gurumurthy, Ajit Doval, Prof R Vaidyanathan and Mahesh Jethmalani—all well-known persons. Doval, the incumbent National Security Advisor, is a former director of the Intelligence Bureau, Vaidyanathan is a professor of finance at IIM-Bangalore, and Jethmalani is a prominent lawyer. Gurumurthy himself is a well-known chartered accountant, and an expert in company law and ways to exploit loopholes in tax laws to the advantage of his clients. He is also frequently a mediator in intra-corporate and inter-corporate disputes. Quite clearly, some people consider him eminent.

However, the report reflects little of the authors' expertise and acumen. It is full of wild conjecture and inaccurate, unsubstantiated allegations and innuendo. Worse, it is badly written and reflects badly on the writing skills of the distinguished four.

A Swiss bank account is shorthand for having illegally earned money, which is then stashed away in Switzerland's banks as that country's laws empower the banks to protect the identities of their clients. There are several such havens where such monies can be stashed away.

Gurumurthy will know this. Many of his clients would, no doubt, be having such accounts. One case readily comes to mind. In the late 1980s, when his friend and mentor Ramnath Goenka was charged with illegally paying for machinery imported by the Indian Express group through Swiss banks, Gurumurthy crafted an ingenious defence. He said that the money was a "hand loan" from a "reputed Swiss jurist"—a Doctor Muller, if I remember right.

Now we know that every second lawyer in Switzerland also serves as a fiduciary (trustee) for his overseas client, who may not be able to directly operate his/her account. And every two-bit lawyer can be passed off as an eminent jurist. The purpose of referring to this is not to rake up an old and obviously undecided case, but to draw attention to the flexibility with facts and stretch of imagination that are Gurumurthy's hallmarks.

The BJP report alleges that Rajiv Gandhi had over 2.5 billion Swiss francs in his name in an unnamed Swiss bank, and attributes this to a story that appeared in the November 11, 1991 issue of a lurid pictorial magazine, Schweizer Illustrierte. The story whose focus is on the money stashed away by Imelda Marcos, wife of the late Philippines dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, has a box with photographs and names of persons with alleged holdings in Switzerland.

Now, in November 1991, Rajiv Gandhi was dead for several months. And the charge that he held nearly ₹10,000 crore in a secret Swiss account is ludicrous. This amount is equal to about 10% of the 1991 Union budget, and India's foreign exchange reserves then were just over ₹4,000 crore. Even today, when India has over fifty dollar billionaires, many of whom are Gurumurthy's friends if not clients, ₹10,000 crore is still a lot of money. The total kickback amount implied in the Bofors deal—the biggest corruption case of the 1980s—was, by today's standards, a tiddly-widdly ₹64 crore. Even if Rajiv Gandhi got all of it—even Gurumurthy would not say this was the case since his friends, the Hinduja brothers of London, too, got some of the Bofors commissions—there would have had to be a huge number of similar deals. Now, that just didn't happen during Rajiv Gandhi's five years as prime minister.

Apart from this, Gurmurthy et al conclude that all transactions covered in the IMF report 'Cross-Border Investment in Small International Financial Centers', which estimates such transactions to total $19 trillion, is black money. This is a gross misreading of the report. The report lists out country-wise transactions through these havens, but nowhere does the study refer to this money as black money or criminally-obtained money

Several nations invest their reserves through banks located in these tax havens, and several corporations also do this. The BJP report wrongly takes this amount to be all black money, and cites a study done by one EJ Fagan, a mere intern at an NGO called Global Financial Integrity. The integrity of such a citation cannot mean much.

The report also uses another dubious source to suggest that the Gandhi family received money from the KGB, the former Soviet Union's intelligence agency. The source cited here is the so-called Mitrokhin Archives, authored by a walk-in defector from KGB to Britain's SIS.

Mitrokhin reveals that the KGB made payments to Indira Gandhi since the early 1970s. This is at best hearsay. Facts do not suggest such a cozy relationship between KGB and Indira Gandhi. In August 1975 her government expelled a senior KGB officer VV Mizin and his junior, Alexander Portyrailo, posted in New Delhi as diplomats, for activities incompatible with their diplomatic status. The Mitrokhin Archives also suggest that Rahul Gandhi, too, had money paid into his bank account in the mid-1970s—a laughable allegation as it would imply that Rahul was a recipient of KGB payoffs when he was a child!

Now, LK Advani is a decent and honourable man. When Sonia Gandhi wrote to him, he saw an apology as the honourable way out. But the politician in Advani peeks out when he also wrote that Sonia Gandhi should have rebutted the article in 1991, when in all probability she might not even have known that it was published in some Swiss rag.

Politics is a competition for power. But, in a democracy it is incumbent that the competition be not only within the limits prescribed by law but, more importantly, also within the limits of decency.

The author is Chairman and Founder of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, New Delhi and former Economic Advisor to the Vajpayee Government. The opinions expressed are his own. He tweets at @mohanguruswamy