Christian Michel’s lawyer Rosemary Patrizi told The Quint that her client never named senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel in his statement before the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
In the supplementary chargesheet filed in the Patiala House court by ED on Thursday (4 April), the agency has claimed that Michel, an accused in the case, in his statement to ED on 5 January 2019 has stated that the abbreviation ‘AP’ mentioned in the budget sheet stands for ‘Ahmed Patel’. PM Modi repeated this claim in his Dehradun rally on 5 April.
The ED received this ‘budget sheet’ in response to its Letter Rogatory sent to Italy. The budget sheet was recovered from Guido Haschke’s residence, a middleman in the VVIP chopper case.
The agency claims in the chargesheet that ‘as per the budget sheet, 30 million Euro was paid as a bribe to Air Force officers, Bureaucrats and Politicians’. There are several abbreviations mentioned in the ‘Political’ section, and one of them is ‘AP’.