BHEL and NTPC accused of accepting bribes from U.S Based Company

Officials from Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) and the state owned NTPC have allegedly accepted bribes from a U.S based company. The allegations filed in the U.S Court claim that these bribes were accepted in exchange for large contracts. The U.S based company in question is the Control Component Inc (CCI),California.

The Control Component Inc., a company involved with the manufacture of valves admitted to making approximately 236 corrupt payments from 2003 to 2007 in over 30 countries in exchange for contracts that amounted to about $ 46.5 million in revenue. India, China, UAE and Qatar are some of the countries that the CCI has business partnerships with. According to the petitions filed in court, the payments made to the Indian companies were between 2004 and 2007.

The Sipat Project in Chattisgargh is one of the main projects which the NTPC is in charge of. However, the PSU, in a release said that the NTPC had not yet placed any direct order from the said company. Meanwhile officials from BHEL have not made any comments, deeming the whole outburst as baseless. “It is a general statement with no specific details, BHEL can comment only when full details (as put up by Control Component to the US court) are accessible,” a BHEL official has said.

Topping the list is the Sipat Project, for which the bribe was allegedly paid in two installments totaling up to $163,449. The first payment of $26,865 was made on November 29, 2009. In order to secure the contract for the Sipat Thermal plant project. The money was moved from the company’s Handelsbanken Bank account in Sweden to an account at Dresdner Bank in New York. The second installment of $136,584.98 was made in October, 2006, from the same Handelsbanken Bank account in Sweden to an account at the Baltic International bank in Latvia.