Low-profile Ahmed Patel takes centre stage to defend Congress, Sonia

 A usually low profile Ahmed Patel, the political secretary to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, launched an all out campaign to clear the name of his leader from the AgustaWestland controversy.

Patel’s name also figures in documents presented to an Italian Court of Appeals that convicted senior officials of AgustaWestland and its parent company Finmeccanica on charges of false accounting and corruption. “What is the proof that AP mentioned in the court documents refers to Ahmed Patel? Mere mention of AP cannot be an indictment. AP can mean anything,” Patel, a close confidant of the Congress president, told mediapersons.

The 66-year-old leader from Gujarat has been a member of the core group of the Congress and is known to have played a key role in all the important decisions taken by the party since 2004. On Wednesday, he was in a combative mood as the court documents refer to ‘Signora Gandhi’ as the driving force behind the purchase of the VVIP choppers and the need to lobby her to swing the deal. “My party and my leader has nothing to do with it,” Patel said dismissing the charges as “baseless”. “There is not an iota of evidence against me or my leader,” he said.

Since the controversy re-surfaced, Patel has also been demanding for speedier investigation into the case by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate, ordered by the then UPA government in 2013.

“The NDA government has been in office for 24 months. They should speed up the investigation to find the truth,” he said. Referring to media reports, Patel said even James Christian Michel, the middle-man in the AgustaWestland deal, has said that the writing on the documents presented before court was not his.

“These are forged documents,” he said. The Congress maintains that unverified noting and a hand-written diary cannot be admissible as evidence in Indian courts.