New Delhi: A Rolls Royce enters the frame, three uniformed police officers armed with automatic weapons guarding its occupant. One can stumble across many such videos of this Gatsby-like figure on social media, flaunting luxury watches, smoking expensive cigars and hosting lavish parties with belly dancers entertaining guests.
Once given the moniker of ‘Lord of War’, Abhishek Verma, and his wife, former Romanian model Anca Verma, make no secret of their luxury lifestyle despite facing charges of violation of the Official Secrets Act, and money laundering, among others.
In a fresh development, a CBI court last week took cognizance of a supplementary chargesheet filed against him in a forgery case on 4 July. The court has asked the CBI to summon Verma to court on 1 November. Verma, however, denied receiving any summons in this regard.
In this case, Verma is accused of forging a CBI officer’s signature to claim that he got a clean chit in the 2005 Naval War Room leak case. The CBI had initially filed a closure report in this case which was challenged by Verma’s former US-based attorney C. Edmonds Allen in 2018. That same year, a special CBI court ruled in Allen’s favour and rejected the closure report while directing the CBI to probe the matter further.
Ten years after he was arrested following sensational allegations of routing payoffs made by blacklisted Swiss defence supplier Rheinmetall Air Defence, Verma is now trying to rebrand himself as a businessman. And at the core of his plans, is a company called Olialia, with interests ranging from tobacco and fashion to colas, and even an international airport.
Of the seven cases against him — five were registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and two by the Enforcement Directorate (ED). Out of these cases, Verma has been acquitted in three, and is facing trial in the remaining four.
Claiming that all cases against him are “false”, Verma told ThePrint that these “politically motivated” cases were lodged at the “behest of a few political rivals” he had in the Congress.
His mother Veena Verma is a three-time former Rajya Sabha MP, while his father, poet Shrikant Verma, was a Congress leader who also served as a member of the Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh.
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Murky past
Verma’s brush with central agencies dates back to 1999, when the ED booked him for alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA). Verma was accused of using a Bank of India account to purchase and sell foreign exchange to persons other than authorised dealers between 1991 and 1992. Trial in this case is still ongoing.
In October 2005, India, after four years of negotiations, signed one of its biggest ever arms purchase deals to procure six Scorpene submarines from the French company, Thales. In 2006, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused Verma in Parliament of receiving kickbacks to the tune of USD 200 million from Thales as a middleman for this deal. Verma had then denied the charges and filed a defamation case against BJP leader L.K. Advani.
The CBI conveyed to the Supreme Court in 2009 that it had failed to establish any link between Verma and the submarine deal. Efforts by the ED to locate accounts the agency believed Verma held in Liechtenstein, too, did not bear fruit.
In 2006, the Naval War Room Leak case — involving over 7,000 pages of sensitive information allegedly leaked from the Naval War Room and the Indian Air Force HQ — was registered. Verma was arrested in the case that same year and spent two years in jail before he was granted bail. Trial in this case is still pending.
Verma was booked in another case — still under trial — under The Prevention of Corruption Act in 2012 for allegedly writing a letter to the prime minister on a forged letterhead of the then Minister of State (MoS) for Home, Ajay Maken, seeking easing of business visa norms.
In June 2012, Verma was arrested yet again for allegedly taking USD 5,30,000 from Rheinmetall Air Defence to wield his influence to stall the blacklisting proceedings initiated by the government against the Swiss firm in the aftermath of the Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) scam. He was acquitted in this case in 2017. That same year, he was also acquitted in a money laundering case registered by the ED in 2012.
Verma was booked under the Officials Secrets Act in 2012 for alleged possession of classified documents from the Ministry of Defence (MoD), including files related to the air force’s acquisition plans, and the minutes of a meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council.
The case against him was registered after a formal complaint by the MoD, alleging that documents shared by Verma’s US-based attorney were classified and their possession amounted to violation of the Official Secrets Act.
This case, too, is under trial.
Verma, however, maintains that he was never associated with any defence deals. “I never had any association with defence deals. We had communication projects and that was with BSNL. We had not contracted with the MoD, we only supplied equipment to BSNL and ran a few parts of the equation at the back end,” he said.
Alleging that all cases registered against them were a result of “political vendetta”, Verma told ThePrint: “We were there for false allegations all of which led to acquittals and discharge and all the three cases that are pending, in all, the witnesses have come forward and no wrongdoing has been attributed to me.”
“In the OSA case, nothing has been attributed to me and in fact, the documents there, all witnesses have said that these are not documents that are classified (sic). It is there in the testimony of the witnesses,” he added.
Stint in Tihar jail
During his time in Tihar jail between 2006 and 2008 and then again from 2012 and 2016, Verma “had it all, from outside food to luxury clothes”, a source told ThePrint.
“Once during a raid, the jail officials had recovered many branded clothes. In fact, once a jail officer had found out about the search that was to happen inside his cell and he alerted Verma, affecting the seizure,” the source added.
Verma denied that he was given special treatment and said a probe into the matter found that he had committed no violations. “A letter was written to PM Manmohan Singh by C. Edmonds Allen, my former attorney in the US, making these allegations and there was an enquiry. It was, however, found that there was no misuse of any facility at Tihar.”
“I did not have any food from outside except the medical diet that was prescribed by the doctors of Tihar,” Verma said, adding that “non-spicy” food was cooked for him separately in Tihar with permission from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
“I was in Vipassana ward for meditation, and as a policy there, they serve food which is non-spicy, without onion and garlic or coffee or tea,” he said.
Verma, however, conceded that he wore branded clothes inside prison. “If you ask whether I was wearing nice suits or not, yes I was. When I was in Tihar, it did not mean that I had to wear shabby clothes and not shave. Undertrials, as per jail rules, can maintain themselves and are not allowed to change their usual appearance.”
“All my clothes and bedding were brought as per jail rules. We were bringing all that through the front door. Now, if I am going to jail, it doesn’t mean I start wearing a kambal (blanket), and not brush my teeth,” he added.
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Olialia
According to Olialia’s website, its investment team focuses on “core consumer sectors of FMCG, infrastructure & media, music & entertainment, financial services, transportation and airports”.
Olialia was even invited to build an international airport in the Maldives — Maldivian media later suggested that the company was shortlisted but no agreement was signed. Verma, on the other hand, claims that his company has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Maldivian government.
“We have been into business all along and FMCG is our forte now. Our brand is from Lithuania which we acquired a few years ago and launched several products in India and abroad with that brand, which includes pan masala, tobacco, frozen foods, beer and cigarettes. “We will soon be launching cola. We have other products from this brand in Baltic countries, and in the Maldives we are developing an international airport,” Verma told ThePrint.
He further explained that the brand was “acquired partially in 2011” but everything “came to a standstill” in 2012 with his arrest and that of his wife. “In September of 2016, we came out and in 2017, we launched all these businesses together, which is now going very well and we hope to expand more and take it to new heights.”
‘Being wealthy in India a crime?’
“I am a businessman, an industrialist and we are producing goods, so if we are wealthy, what is the sin? Why so much scrutiny? Wealth is not something new to me. I have been brought up in it. In India, is being wealthy a crime?” Verma asked.
However, police sources claim their investigation in the 1999 FERA case against him revealed that despite not having a bank account in India, Verma still managed to pay a hefty rent for his farmhouse and luxury lifestyle — claims Verma termed as “baseless”.
Refuting the claims, Verma told ThePrint that he now holds a “legitimate bank account, PAN card” and “files taxes each year”.
Verma further clarified that a Delhi court granted him police cover in 2017 to shield him from alleged threats owing to his role as a witness in a 1984 riots case.
People often question my wealth and lifestyle, believing that I may have made money “illegally” from “defence deals”, Verma said, claiming that such ideas are “completely untrue” as he is at the helm of a “flourishing FMCG and infra business”.
(This report has been updated with additional inputs)
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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