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'You will hear more about Bofors in the next few days'

The investigation relating to the Bofors gun deal appears to have reached a crucial stage.

"You will hear more about it in the next few days," Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary M Venkaiah Naidu told the media in Madras.

He said people accused in the case and now out of the country were expected to be brought back. They were expected to reveal the identity of the real beneficiaries of the deal, he said, but did not elaborate.

Naidu was replying to a query about the "deafening silence" over the investigation of the Bofors case after the BJP-led government came to power.

It was not clear whether the Malaysian government has agreed to the extradition of Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrochi who has been charged with receiving kickbacks in the deal.

Naidu said Congress president Sonia Gandhi had been giving the so-called "green signals" to other Opposition parties to bring down the A B Vajpayee government in the past two months. Nothing, however, had happened.

Asked about All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazagham supremo J Jayalalitha's allegation that hefty bribes had been received by someone close to the prime minister for the transfer of Enforcement Director M K Bezbaruah, Naidu said that controversy was over as she was no more raising the allegation.

On Jayalalitha's charge that the Cauvery accord was a fraud on the farmers of Tamil Nadu, he said the statement should be viewed in the context of local compulsions.

On the controversy relating to the mention of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi's name in the action taken report of the Jain Commission's final report, Naidu said it was only a 'typographical error'.

The government had clarified that the reference dealing with Karunanidhi in the ATR would continue. There was no politics or no deal in it as speculated in the media, he added.

UNI

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