This is what Prasun K Sengupta explained
Original poster question
"It was for the first time that the defence ministry took stock of military sales through an account held by the US government and found that due to "ill-management of this account, slightly less than $ 3 billion piled up"
Is there an explaination for that?
And then,
"In May-June last year, we reviewed it. We have re calibrated it has come down from about $3 billion to $1.8 billlon," he said.
PSK replied
Regarding FMS, everyone in the media was totally confused because they simply do not know how the FMS system works. Here's how it works:
- After inking a FMS procurement contract, the buyer immediately makes a wire-transfer via SWIFT of the initial down-payment (20% of contract value) to the US Defense Dept's account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
- The Defense Dept in turn transfers this money to the US prime industrial contractor that builds the hardware.
- Under FMS, India cannot make direct payments to the US OEM (just as India cannot directly pay Russian OEMs, but has to pay Rosoboronexport which in turn disburses the amount to the Russian OEMs).
- When it comes to progressive payment tranches as well as payments kept as deposits for obtaining prompt spares support, the international norm is to keep this money in an escrow account so that the principal amount gathers interest, & release the money by wire-transfer once the contract has been fulfilled.
- But in India's case, the MoD's bureaucrats knew next-to-nothing about escrow accounts & therefore ended up making progress payments directly to the US Defense Dept (which do not gather any interest), leading to a pile-up of India-paid US$ with the US DoD.
- The norm is to release money from the escrow account ONLY after 2 criteria have been met:
- 1) Factory Acceptance Tests of the hardware; &
- 2) Pre-Delivery Inspections prior to the hardware being shipped/ferried out.
- But it now appears that officials of the MoD were unaware of such norms until recently!
- Now, corrective action has been taken & therefore more liquidity is now available to the MoD to make payments for hardware purchases in US$ for a lot of non-US products.
- Inference: A K Antony & Co were criminally negligent while discharging their duties, plain & simple.
@Abingdonboy @Levina @anant_s @ranjeet @JanjaWeed @nair @MilSpec @AUSTERLITZ
If PSK description is correct, then i wonder how much mismanagement is really inside MOD tranche payment system...
hopefully DM MP will review and corrective actions will be taken to see that we dont repeat this mistake.