Reliance pact was ‘imperative’ and ‘mandatory’ for Dassault: Report

NEWDELHI: A French media report on Wednesday suggested that a senior official in Dassault Aviation saw the partnership with Anil Ambani’s Reliance group as “imperative and mandatory” to getting the “export contract” with India for the Rafale aircraft.

Mediapart quoted an internal Dassault Aviation document detailing a presentation that deputy chief executive officer Loïk Segalen gave to worker representatives explaining the rationale for setting up a joint venture in Nagpur with Reliance Aerospace.

During the presentation, the report said, Segalen described the joint venture as a “contrepartie” to getting the “export contract India”.

Contrepartie roughly translates to “compensation” or to refer to something given as compensation. This could be a reference to the offsets.

It was not clear whether the Dassault executive was referring to the sale of Rafale jets to India or the offset obligations it would have to fulfill by sourcing from India. The report triggered immediate reactions from Congress leaders who called it “explosive”. “Explosive revelation in French media: an internal Dassault document says the Reliance offset deal was a “trade-off”, “imperative and obligatory” to clinch the Rafale deal”, said Congress MP Shashi Tharoor in a tweet on Wednesday night.

The Union ministry of defence did not immediately respond to a request for a response. Mediapart said in its report that Dassault Aviation did not react.

Wednesday’s report comes less than a month after Mediapart quoted former French president Francois Hollande as saying that the Indian government proposed the name of Ambani’s Reliance Group as Dassault Aviation’s offset partner. “We had no say in this regard,” he was quoted as saying – a statement that both the India and the French governments denied.