———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Seema Sapra <seema.sapra@googlemail.com>
Date: Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 5:15 PM
Subject: Please pass on this message to the Hon’ble Richard J. Holwell, United States District Judge, Southern District of New York
To: william_donald@nysd.uscourts.gov, brett_kaufman@nysd.uscourts.gov, usanys.crcomp@usdoj.gov, NDwebmail@state.gov, askdoj@usdoj.gov
Cc: "Denniston, Brackett (GE, Corporate)" <brackett.denniston@ge.com>, kdonovan-maher@bermandevalerio.com, greg.danilow@weil.com, rcohen@lowey.com, fcpa.fraud@usdoj.gov, ffetf@usdoj.gov, newhaven@ic.fbi.gov, ny1@ic.fbi.gov, usanys.wpcomp@usdoj.gov, CleggD1@state.gov, chairmanoffice@sec.gov, help@sec.gov
Dear Judge Richard J. Holwell,
I am an attorney in India and had worked as Legal Counsel for GE Transportation’s business activities in India in 2010. I have brought to your attention that I made a compliance complaint to General Electric that is relevant to lawsuits which were filed by General Electric investors before your Court.
I complained that GE employees engaged in criminal conduct amounting to obstruction of justice under US federal statute and tampered with evidence about events that occurred in February 2009. These facts and this evidence are relevant to the cases filed by GE investors before you in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York.
I complained that material information regarding GE’s failed bid for a multi-billion dollar tender for an Indian Railways project for manufacture and sale of diesel locomotives was not disclosed to GE investors in February 2009. This information was capable of influencing share-prices and thus relevant to the shareholder lawsuits filed in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York. I further complained that once these lawsuits were filed in 2009, GE employees tampered with the evidence establishing knowledge of this failed bid by GE officers including Mr.Jeffrey Immelt, Mr. John Rice and Mr. Lorenzo Simonelli. I accidently found out information about events of February 2009 even though I joined GE in April 2010. I mentioned the information I thus acquired to a colleague without realising its significance. This started a process of harassment and retaliation against me by the employees in the New Delhi office who were involved in concealing evidence and creating a misleading record. I ended up raising a compliance concern to the GE General Counsel and Ombudsman in September 2010 that this might involve a securities fraud. (At that time I had no knowledge about the cases filed against GE in 2009. I found out about these cases only in April 2011.) GE retaliated against me and terminated my services. It then carried out a compliance investigation in which Gibson Dunn was involved. However, my complaint was not investigated by GE and Gibson Dunn and the matter was covered up. GE declared its investigation over at the beginning of February 2011. I subsequently responded to GE in writing in April 2011 pointing out that the matter was being covered up and there was sufficient basis for my complaint. It was at this time that I found out about the lawsuits filed by GE investors after February 2009 and I only then understood the full significance of my complaint. I pointed out to GE that evidence showed that offences amounting to obstruction of justice might have been committed. Tampering of evidence, asking employees to lie,suppression/ destruction of evidence and creation of a misleading record to influence a United States Federal Court proceeding would amount to US federal offences and obstruction of justice under US federal statutes.
Among other evidence of what happened around GE’s failed bid in February 2009, I have seen an email sent by GE Transportation employee Mr. Brett Begole to Mr. John Rice and Mr. Karan Bhatia (another GE lawyer) in February 2009 suggesting that a news report from February 2009 that had hinted at GE’s difficulties with the bid be either allowed to die a natural death or that senior Government of India officials (Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Mr. Ronen Sen, the then Indian Ambassador in Washington) be spoken to. This email was shown to me by Mr. Jeffrey Eglash in New Delhi in late 2010 when he met me during a compliance investigation. This email is suggestive of corruption and demonstrates why GE officers, attorneys and employees might have wanted to prevent their documentary record pertaining to the failed February 2009 bid from being scrutinized by a United States Federal Court. I would like to submit documentary and other evidence on this issue to the Court.
I had informed GE lawyers and ombudsman about my complaint in 2010. The matter was covered up. I thereafter brought the complaint to the attention of the United States SEC and the United States Department of Justice. In 2011, I also brought my complaint to the attention of the Plaintiffs attorneys in several of the law-suits including the partners at Berman DeValerio representing “State Universities Retirement System of Illinois”. I was then contacted by Mr. Ronald J. Keating, the Director of Investigations at Berman DeValerio and I shared detailed facts and documents (substantiating my complaint) on email with Mr. Ronald J. Keating. Ms. Kathleen M. Donovan-Maher, an attorney and a partner at Berman DeValerio was copied on all my correspondence with Mr. Ronald J. Keating. I subsequently made General Electric including Mr. Brackett Denniston, the SEC and the United States Department of Justice aware of my entire communications with Berman DeValerio. I have also recently brought my complaint to the attention of the attorneys representing General Electric before your Court including Mr. Greg Danilow. Further I have contacted various authorities including the United States Ambassador in New Delhi, the United States Attorney General and also the US Legal Attaché (from the FBI) in New Delhi.
I face a grave, immediate and on-going threat to life on account of this complaint as it adversely affects General Electric Executives including Mr. Jeffrey Immelt, Mr. John Rice, Mr. Brackett Denniston, Mr. Alex Dimitrief and Mr. Lorenzo Simonelli.
On the night of 12 January 2012 (Indian time) which would be the forenoon of 12 January 2012 (EST), I called and spoke with the Deputy to your Court (Mr. Bill Donald) and informed him in brief about the nature of my complaint. I told him I was an attorney who had complained about obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence by General Electric concerning facts which were relevant to the General Electric investor law-suits filed in your Court. I informed him that I faced a threat to my life on account of this. He transferred my call to Mr. Brett Kaufman who I was told was the assigned clerk for the case. I briefly explained to Mr. Kaufman why I was calling and informed him about my complaint of obstruction of justice and evidence tampering in connection with the General Electric investor law-suits. I told Mr. Brett Kaufman that I wanted to bring the facts about my complaints to the notice of the Judge. I was advised to send an ex-parte letter to you and I sent a letter addressed to you on the email addresses of Mr. Bill Donald and Mr. Brett Kaufman. I am now providing further detail regarding my complaint.
In 2010, I worked for GE as Legal Counsel for GE Transportation’s business activities in India. I directly reported to Ms. Tara Plimpton, General Counsel for GE Transportation. My boss in India was Mr. Prat (Pratyush) Kumar who is a US citizen and was at that time employed by a US based General Electric entity. He was heading GE Transportation’s business activities and efforts in India and he reported directly to Mr. Lorenzo Simonelli.
I was hired towards the end of April 2010 to provide legal support for General Electric’s bid to win a multi-billion US dollar tender from a Government of India entity, the Indian Railways. This tender provide the opportunity to win a contract from the Indian Railways to set up a plant(factory) in India for the manufacture of diesel locomotives. The tender also included a confirmed purchase order of a 1000 locomotives to be manufactured and supplied over a period of ten years. The purchase order would also include a maintenance contract for the supplied locomotives for a period of 15 years. I refer to this business opportunity hereafter as the “Tender”.
General Electric had participated in this Tender along with another US company, EMD in 2008-2009. The process for winning the tender has two parts. The first step is a pre-qualification process where bids are invited, evaluated and accepted based upon meeting prescribed technical and financial criteria. The second step is the financial bid where the short-listed bidders are invited to submit a price-bid and in the normal course the bidder offering a more competitive price is awarded the contract.
GE failed to win this Tender in February 2009. A fresh Tender for the same project was opened again by Indian Railways in 2010.
When I joined GE in April 2010, I was told that GE and EMD had both prequalified in the earlier round of the Tender (in 2008-2009). I was told that during the price-bid, GE was the sole bidder and EMD did not submit a bid. I was told that the Indian Railways cancelled the Tender in 2009 because there was a single price bid. I was also told that another factor that cost GE the bid in 2009 was the 2009 General Elections in India. This information was provided to me by Mr. Prat Kumar when I interviewed with him for the job.
I joined GE on 23 April 2010. Sometime during the week of 26 April 2010, I was sitting with Prat Kumar and Ramesh Mathur. We were discussing the language for certain certifications that GE would make in the Request for Prequalification for another Indian Railways tender – this one was for electric locomotives. During this conversation Prat Kumar expressed his view that all this legal precision and back and forth was unnecessary because ultimately in his view the Indian Railways had full authority to do whatever it wanted under the RFQ. He then said that in 2009, GE’s bid “was perfect” yet GE did not get the tender.
On 1 May 2010, I attended a meeting with an Indian Railways official along with Mr. Prat Kumar, Mr. Ash (Ashfaq) Nainar and Ms. Alpna Khera from GE. During this meeting I heard the Railways official tell Mr. Prat Kumar that GE would have won the tender in 2009 if they had not made a mistake in their financial bid. He stated that he hoped GE would not make a mistake in its bidding documents in the 2010 round. I was surprised to learn about this mistake. However after the meeting, Mr. Prat Kumar was aggressive and I did not ask about this.
I had no intention of probing the matter of this mistake even though this information contradicted what I had been told earlier by Mr. Prat Kumar and others at GE. I was preoccupied with the fresh tender in 2010. However, I accidently mentioned that GE had made a mistake in 2009 to a colleague Mr. Gaurav Negi on 12 May 2010. The very next day, I first received what sounded like a warning call from HR. Mr. Arvind Subramanian, the HR Manager asked me if I was feeling disgruntled. Prat Kumar came into the office looking worked up. I was summoned to his room and without preamble he started to target me by picking at my work and raising his voice in the presence of Gaurav Negi and other colleagues. Prat Kumar insisted that the only mistake with GE’s bid in in 2009 was in the Power of Attorney. He humiliated me publicly. Thereafter for the next two months I was at the receiving end of sustained retaliation, targeting and harassment at the hands of Mr. Prat Kumar and the GE employees who worked under him at the local office in New Delhi. I was unable to understand the cause of this targeting which seemed to be intended to make me quit. I discussed this harassment with Ms. Tara Plimpton, General Counsel of GE Transportation and with another GE attorney there, Mr. James Winget. I also discussed this harassment with the GE India General Counsel, Mr. Deepak Adlakha. I was told that Mr. Prat Kumar was difficult to work with, crossed compliance lines and that the team under him was not very competent and that the hostilities were a result of this. I was assured that I had the full support of the legal team. During that period I got the impression that I had committed an error in mentioning the mistake in 2009 and that the hostility towards me was on account of that incident. However I kept quiet about the matter and continued to do my job under difficult conditions.
In July 2010, GE employees I was working with including Mr. Prat Kumar altered a document (a customer certificate received from Kazakhstan Railways) and submitted it to the Indian Railways on July 12, 2010 as part of GE’s Request for Prequalification for the tender. I was not a participant to this alteration which amounts to a forgery under Indian law and as I understand under US federal law as well.
After this incident the targeting escalated. I have complained that I was being drugged during this time. I resigned and then withdrew my resignation and told GE that I wanted to raise compliance concerns. I was discouraged but I persisted. I then filed a complaint that I had been targeted because of my having learnt about the mistake in GE’s price bid in 2009 and because I had mentioned it to a colleague. At that time, I had limited information and I complained that Mr. Prat Kumar and other employees at the local Delhi office had lied to their bosses about why GE did not win the bid in 2009. An internal investigation was launched by Ms. Tara Plimpton. However I realised that this was a cover-up. I therefore escalated my complaint and sent it to to Mr. Jeffrey Immelt, Mr. Brackett Denniston and the GE Ombudsperson as well. In my note to them I stated that my complaint about the bid-mistake from 2009 being covered up might amount to a securities fraud. I was immediately fired after this. I left GE but emailed Mr. Denniston that I would pursue my complaint. In that email, I used the words “securities fraud” in connection with my complaint about the February 2009 cover-up. Mr. Denniston asked Mr. Alex Dimitrief and Mr. Jeffrey Eglash to investigate my complaint.
After this, I found out additional information from the internet and news reports about what had happened in February 2009 in so far as GE’s failed bid was concerned. At that time, I was not aware of the investor law-suits filed against GE that covered the period February 2009. I met Mr. Jeffrey Eglash and Mr. John Chesley (from Gibson Dunn) in New Delhi in November 2010. During this meeting I told Mr. Jeffrey Eglash that GE had failed to disclose to investors in February 2009 that it had lost the bid. That this information was capable of influencing share prices and that failure to disclose material information to investors could amount to a securities fraud. I recall telling Mr. Eglash that what I was saying was at least as significant as the comments made by Henry Paulson. Mr. Eglash did not tell me about the pending investor law-suits. Instead he attempted to persuade me that GE had indeed disclosed the information that it had lost the bid to the Indian press. To support his point, Mr. Eglash showed me a press clipping of an Indian news report dated February 23 2009 that mentioned a mistake in GE’s bid. He told me that this clipping showed that GE was not hiding information. I read the extract Mr. Eglash handed over to me and told him that on the contrary it showed that GE was still claiming it would win the tender and that any difficulties with a “mathematical error” with its price bid had been resolved. I asked Mr. Eglash for the first half of the news report he had handed me. He gave me two additional pages. That is when I read the email from Mr. Brett BeGole from GE Transportation addressed to Mr. John Rice and to Mr. Karan Bhatia, an attorney at GE. This email suggested that the news report dated February 23, 2009 that had hinted at GE’s difficulties with the bid be either allowed to die a natural death or that senior Government of India officials (Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Mr. Ronen Sen, the then Indian Ambassador in Washington) be spoken to. I informed Mr. Eglash of the significance of this email.
When Mr. Jeffrey Eglash showed me the email from Mr. Brett Begole, Mr. John Chesley from Gibson Dunn was not in the room. However, the email and news report was retrieved by Mr. Eglash from a binder/ folder containing documents. This Binder had as I understand been put together by Gibson Dunn after reviewing documents at GE. Therefore, Mr. F. Joseph Warin and Mr. John Chesley from Gibson Dunn have personal knowledge of this email which they must have reviewed.
After this meeting, I sent Mr. Eglash, Mr. Dimitrief and Mr. Denniston a compilation of news reports that I had found on the internet. These reports show that GE submitted a price bid for the Tender on 16 February 2009. By February 23, 2009, the Government of India had already taken a firm decision to scrap the tender. The Government of India held a Cabinet meeting on February 23, 2009 where it took the decision to adopt a different policy route for these projects. The decision to scrap the tender by Indian Railways was communicated to the Cabinet in this meeting on February 23, 2009. Therefore it would appear that this decision to reject GE’s bid was taken by the Indian Railways after February 16 and before February 23, 2009. GE must have been informed of this decision both verbally and in writing. GE did not disclose to GE investors that its bid had failed. Instead the news report from February 23, 2009 and subsequent news reports that year show that GE was misleading news reporters as well as investors on whether or not it would win this contract.
I also found news reports after March 2009 where Mr. Prat Kumar gave interviews to the Indian press stating that the Government of India had rejected GE’s price-bid without any communication to GE. He made no mention of the mistake GE made in the calculations for its price-bid. I sent these to GE as well.
Mr. Eglash refused to discuss my complaints with me after our meeting. I had to send detailed notes. I have complained that during this period after my meeting with Mr. Jeffrey Eglash, I was drugged by GE and an attempt was made to murder me by introducing toxic gas into my home. I fell ill.
I spoke with Mr. Eglash in January 2011. He threatened me by saying that “we do not want you as our enemy forever”.
A few days later, I received a letter from Mr. Alexander Dimitrief on February 3, 2011 stating that GE had investigated my complaints and they were unfounded. I was unwell for a few weeks.
I started to respond to Mr. Alex Dimitrief’s letter in April 2011. At that time I found out about the investor lawsuits in your Court and I was able to connect all the dots. I sent Mr. Dimitrief a detailed note in response to his letter on my complaint that GE failed to disclose to investors in February 2009 that it had lost the locomotives bid. It was only after finding about the GE investor law-suits that I realised why I had been lied to in GE. And why I had been targeted after I found out about the mistake and mentioned it to a colleague. I sent an email to Mr. Joseph Warin pointing out that my complaint had been misrepresented in Mr. Alex Dimitrief’s letter and that it appeared that GE had tampered with evidence about events related to the Locomotives bid in February 2009.
Mr. Lorenzo Simonelli was personally present in New Delhi in February 2009 just for this Locomotives bid. There is email correspondence from February 2009 between Mr. Simonelli and Mr. Immelt on what was going on in Delhi with the price-bid. They all knew about the mistake.
Yet in 2010, I was told by everyone I spoke to in the Delhi office and at GE Transportation in Erie that GE did not get the bid because it was the sole-bidder. No one mentioned the mistake. I found out about it from an external source, mentioned it to someone at GE and was targeted as a result. In August 2011, I asked Ms. Tara Plimpton if she knew about this mistake. She replied – not that I can remember. I was told by a GE Transportation attorney, Mr. James Winget in August 2010 when discussing my complaint of harassment that this should not happen in GE. He told me that a communication from the Indian Railways in February 2009 had been suppressed.
I was told in August 2010 (when I was still at GE) by Mr. Amit Kumar, an attorney from the Indian law-firm Amarchand Mangaldas, that he had provided his services to GE and helped GE get back its security deposit when GE’s bid in 2009 got derailed because of the mistake. He told me he had still not billed GE for these legal services he provided.
I face a grave threat to my life on account of my accidentally finding out about this tampering with evidence by GE. I have been drugged over the course of a year and a half. Attempts have been made and are still being made to poison me.
I request for your help in this matter. I will send to you the news reports and correspondence between me and GE on this issue.
With Regards,
Seema Sapra
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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Seema Sapra <seema.sapra@googlemail.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 2:20 PM
Subject: Message for Judge Richard J. Holwell
To: william_donald@nysd.uscourts.gov, brett_kaufman@nysd.uscourts.gov, usanys.crcomp@usdoj.gov, NDwebmail@state.gov, askdoj@usdoj.gov
Cc: "Denniston, Brackett (GE, Corporate)" <brackett.denniston@ge.com>, kdonovan-maher@bermandevalerio.com, greg.danilow@weil.com, rcohen@lowey.com, fcpa.fraud@usdoj.gov, ffetf@usdoj.gov, newhaven@ic.fbi.gov, ny1@ic.fbi.gov, usanys.wpcomp@usdoj.gov, CleggD1@state.gov, chairmanoffice@sec.gov, help@sec.gov
Please bring the following information to the attention of Judge Richard J. Holwell. This is further clarification on my complaint regarding obstruction of justice and evidence tampering in connection with the GE investor law-suits.
Thank You,
Seema Sapra
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Seema Sapra <seema.sapra@googlemail.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 2:10 PM
Subject: Further response to Mr. Alex Dimitrief’s letter dated February 3, 2011
To: "Dimitrief, Alexander (GE, Corporate)" <alexander.dimitrief@ge.com>, "Denniston, Brackett (GE, Corporate)" <brackett.denniston@ge.com>
Cc: jeffrey.immelt@ge.com, john.rice@ge.com, john.flannery@ge.com, "Eglash, Jeffrey C (GE, Corporate)" <jeffrey.eglash@ge.com>, "Plimpton, Tara (GE Infra, Transportation, US)" <tara.plimpton@ge.com>, "Warin, F. Joseph" <fwarin@gibsondunn.com>, "Chesley, John" <JChesley@gibsondunn.com>, james.winget@ge.com, greg.danilow@weil.com
Mr. Alex Dimitrief,
I write in connection with your letter dated February 3, 2011. I have already sent several responses, however because I was being drugged and poisoned since July 2010 and all of last year as well, I was not able to point out some readily apparent falsehoods in your communication.
You state that I was engaged as Consultant. This is false. My contract stated otherwise and the work profile I filled was that of Legal Counsel. I was hired as Legal Counsel but on a contract for eleven months. The internal website of the GE Transportation legal team had a pdf organizational chart with pictures and names of the attorneys in Ms. Tara Plimpton’s team. (Ms. Tara Plimpton was the General Counsel for GE Transportation from 2008 till January 2012). When I joined GE in April 2010 there was a place on that chart for the India Legal Counsel. In August 2010, I downloaded that chart and my name was printed on that chart as the Legal Counsel for India for GE Transportation.
I limit this communication mostly to the issue surrounding my complaint of me being misled by GE executives about the reason why GE did not win the Locomotives tender in February 2009. I later understood that GE executives were actually covering up facts and tampering with evidence about these events of February 2009 to avoid these facts from emerging in connection with the GE investor lawsuits filed after February 2009. Please read my comments below in the light of my previous communication on this matter with you and other GE attorneys, external counsel and GE executives.
As already stated before in other communications, my initial complaint made to Ms. Tara Plimpton in August 2010 when I was still at GE, was that Pratyush Kumar and Ashfaq Nainar might have misled GE Officers by concealing the mistake that GE made in its price-bid on February 16, 2009. You go on to state in your letter essentially that GE Officers including Mr. Immelt, Mr. John Rice and Mr. Lorenzo Simonelli all knew about this mistake and that there was a thorough post-mortem review undertaken by GE and therefore the fact of the mistake could not have been concealed.
I have stated that I was told by Pratyush Kumar and others in the Delhi office of GE Transportation and by GE executives from GE Transportation’s Erie office, who I spoke with and exchanged emails with, that GE did not get the bid only because it was a single bidder. I was told by Pratyush Kumar on one occasion in the presence of other GE staff that GE’s bid in 2009 was perfect and on another occasion that the only problem with GE’s bid in 2009 was a printing error in the Power of Attorney. It is clear that Pratyush Kumar was concealing the fact of the mistake in the price-bid from me.
I found out about this mistake accidentally from an Indian Railways official. This led to repercussions. Ten days later, I mentioned the fact of this mistake to another colleague. This started a three-month long process of harassment and targeting directed at me by the GE Transportation India staff which seemed aimed at making me leave my job.
When I first stated in August 2010 that I was being targeted because of my having found out about this mistake, I asked Ms. Tara Plimpton if she knew about this mistake and her reply was “Not that I can remember”.
I spoke with Mr. James Winger, Senior Counsel at GE Transportation in Erie who was working on this deal about this mistake. He admitted knowledge about the mistake and told me the information had filtered down. He also stated that a communication from the Indian Railways had been suppressed.
Ms. Tara Plimpton then started a compliance investigation/ inquiry by nominating Mr. Anil Chaddha, an attorney at GE Transportation based in Erie to gather information from me. This inquiry commenced before I contacted Mr. Brackett Denniston or the GE Corporate ombudsperson.
If the fact of the mistake was common knowledge and was the subject of a post-mortem as you claim and was not being suppressed, then why would Ms. Tara Plimpton tell me that she could not remember if there had been a mistake. Further and more importantly why would Ms. Plimpton appoint a GE attorney to investigate my complaint. All Ms. Plimpton had to do was to tell me that she and other GE executives in Erie and Fairfield were aware of the fact of this mistake and that I could not have been harassed for finding out about it. I add that if this was the mere substance of my complaint on this issue, why would Mr. Brackett Denniston ask you and Mr. Eglash to investigate this complaint, why would GE engage the services of Gibson Dunn to investigate a complaint that had no initial substance in the first place. All Mr. Denniston had to tell me was that he and others were already aware of the fact of this mistake.
After Ms, Plimpton nominated Mr. Anil Chaddha to hear me on my complaint, I spoke to Ms. Himali Arora, the then CFO for GE Transportation in India and she told me everyone knew about the mistake including Mr. Lorenzo Simonelli who was present in New Delhi at the relevant time in February 2009.
Therefore by the time I realised that Mr. Anil Chaddha and Ms. Tara Plimpton were trying to cover up my complaint, I already knew that everybody knew about the mistake.
I thereafter emailed Mr. Brackett Denniston and the GE Corporate Ombudsperson and I asked them to intervene. I sent these emails while I was still at GE and therefore used my GE email account and GE laptop. I do not have a copy of this email but I recall writing that there appeared to be a possible securities fraud here. I received replies from Mr. Brackett Denniston, Mr. Alex Dimitrief and from Mr. Mark Nordstorm that my complaint would be investigated. Instead I was immediately summarily fired on September 20, 2010. I then contacted Mr. Denniston on email the same day on bringing to his notice that I had been fired and that whistle-blower laws had been violated. I quote from this email sent by me to Mr. Denniston on September 20, 2012:
“My complaint about a fraud regarding the reason for GE losing the D Loco bid in 2009 is a potential shareholder fraud and a SEC violation. I intend following up on this. Your response in terminating my contract is in violation of US whistleblower protection laws.”
This email that I sent on September 20, 2010 was also sent to Ms. Tara Plimpton and Mr. Deepak Adlakha with a copy marked to Mr. David Lobo.
Your letter dated February 3, 2011 therefore misrepresents my complaint on this matter. I have already described in earlier communications the interactions that I had later on with Mr. Jeffrey Eglash and Mr. John Chesley during their alleged investigation.
I have also pointed out that GE’s bid had already been finally rejected by the Indian Railways before February 24, 2009. GE would ordinarily have received a written communication from the Indian Railways rejecting GE’s bid and providing reasons there-for. Was this the letter Mr. James Winget told me was suppressed?
The email that Mr. Jeffrey Eglash showed me (sent from Mr. Brett BeGole to Mr. John Rice and Mr. Karan Bhatia) was dated February 24, 2009.
Mr. Amit Kumar, an attorney from the Indian law-firm Amarchand Mangaldas was brought in to provide legal advice on this matter in 2009.
I have provided news reports from 2009 (dating March 2009 and thereafter) where Mr. Pratyush Kumar gave press interviews stating that the Indian Railways cancelled the tender without sending any communication to GE and suggesting that GE was left guessing at the reasons for this action. Why was Mr. Pratyush Kumar making these false statements? Since it is clear that he was not trying to mislead GE executives and Officers, who was Mr. Pratyush Kumar trying to mislead? What was the purpose of these false statements to the Press?
The only inference that can be drawn is that these Press interviews by Mr. Pratyush Kumar were a response to the investor law-suits that were filed against GE after March 2009. All these facts and evidence tie in with my complaint (which I made for the first time in an email sent to Mr. F. Joseph Warin from Gibson Dunn in April 2011, more than two months after your letter dated February 3, 2011) that GE Executives and Officers were tampering with evidence about the events surrounding this tender from February 2009 and the only reason to do so would be the GE investor law-suits that included February 2009 in their class-period.
I have emailed you that I am being drugged, poisoned and gassed because of the above and other compliance violation complaints that I made about General Electric.
Seema Sapra
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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Seema Sapra <seema.sapra@googlemail.com>
Date: Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 11:47 PM
Subject: Please pass on this message to the Hon’ble Richard J. Holwell, United States District Judge, Southern District of New York
To: william_donald@nysd.uscourts.gov, brett_kaufman@nysd.uscourts.gov
Please pass on this message to the Hon’ble Richard J. Holwell, United States District Judge, Southern District of New York.
Dear Judge Richard J. Holwell,
I am an attorney from India and worked with General Electric in New Delhi in 2010. I wish to bring to your notice that I have made a complaint that GE employees engaged in criminal conduct amounting to obstruction of justice under US federal statute and tampered with evidence about events that occurred in February 2009. These facts and this evidence are relevant to the cases filed by GE investors before you in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York.
I had informed GE lawyers and ombudsman about my complaint in 2010. The matter was covered up. I thereafter brought the complaint to the attention of the United States SEC and the United States Department of Justice. In 2011, I also brought my complaint to the attention of the Plaintiffs attorneys. I was contacted by Berman DeValerio and I shared detailed facts and documents with them that substantiated my complaint. I made GE, the SEC and the DOJ aware of my communications with Berman DeValerio. I have also recently brought my complaint to the attention of the attorneys representing GE before your Court. Further I have contacted the United States Embassy in New Delhi, the US Attorney General and also the US Legal Attache (from the FBI) in New Delhi.
I face a threat to life on account of this complaint and other complaints that are mentioned below.
Last night (India time) which would be the forenoon of 12 January 2012, I called the Deputy to your Court and informed him in brief about the nature of my complaint and the threat I was facing. He put my call through to Mr. Brett Kaufman who I was told was the assigned clerk for the case. I briefly explained to Mr. Kaufman why I was calling and informed him that I wanted to bring the facts about my complaint regarding possible obstruction of justice and the resultant threat to life to the notice of the Judge. I was advised to send an ex-parte letter to you and I am therefore writing to you.
In 2010, I worked for GE as Legal Counsel for GE Transportation’s business activities in India. I was directly reporting to Ms. Tara Plimpton, General Counsel for GE Transportation.
I complained that material information regarding GE’s failed bid for a multi-billion dollar tender for an Indian Railways project for manufacture and sale of diesel locomotives was not disclosed to GE investors in February 2009. This information was capable of influencing share-prices and thus relevant to the shareholder lawsuits filed in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York. I further complained that once these lawsuits were filed in 2009, GE employees tampered with the evidence establishing knowledge of this failed bid by top GE officers including Mr. Jeffrey Immelt, Mr. John Rice and Mr. Lorenzo Simonelli. I accidently found out information about events of February 2009 even though I joined GE in April 2010. I mentioned the information I thus acquired to a colleague without realising its significance. This started a process of harassment and retaliation against me by the employees in the New Delhi office who were involved in concealing evidence and creating a misleading record. I ended up raising a compliance concern to the GE General Counsel and Ombudsman in September 2010 that this might involve a securities fraud. (At that time I had no knowledge about the cases filed against GE in 2009. I found out about these cases only in April 2011.) GE retaliated against me and terminated my services. It then carried out a compliance investigation in which Gibson Dunn was involved. However, my complaint was not investigated by GE and Gibson Dunn and the matter was covered up. GE declared its investigation over at the beginning of February 2011. I subsequently responded to GE in writing in April 2011 pointing out that the matter was being covered up and there was sufficient basis for my complaint. It was at this time that I found out about the lawsuits filed by GE investors after February 2009 and I only then understood the full significance of my complaint. I pointed out to GE that evidence showed that offences amounting to obstruction of justice might have been committed. Tampering of evidence, asking employees to lie, suppression/ destruction of evidence and creation of a misleading record to influence a United States Federal Court proceeding would amount to US federal offences and obstruction of justice under US federal statutes.
Among other evidence of what happened around GE’s failed bid in February 2009, I have seen an email sent by GE Transportation employee Mr. Brett Begole to Mr. John Rice and Mr. Karan Bhatia (another GE lawyer) in February 2009 suggesting that a news report from February 2009 that had hinted at GE’s difficulties with the bid be either allowed to die a natural death or that senior Government of India officials (Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Mr. Ronen Sen, the then Indian Ambassador in Washington) be spoken to. This email was shown to me by Mr. Jeffrey Eglash in New Delhi in late 2010 when he met me during a compliance investigation. This email is suggestive of corruption and demonstrates why GE officers, attorneys and employees might have wanted to prevent their documentary record pertaining to the failed February 2009 bid from being scrutinized by a United States Federal Court. I would like to submit documentary and other evidence on this issue to the Court.
I made complaints about other compliance violations as well, but none of these was properly investigated and matters were covered up. I believe that the principal reason for not investigating these other complaints was to avoid the truth about the evidence from February 2009 coming to light as at that time GE was arguing its Motion to Dismiss filed in the cases before your Court.
My other complaints are not relevant to the proceedings before your Court but I mention them here to indicate the gravity of what I complained about.
I complained that a customer certificate from Kazakhstan Railways was altered by GE employees and then submitted by GE to the Government of India as part of its request for qualification for an Indian Railways locomotive tender in July 2010. Such alteration would constitute forgery rendering the guilty GE employees liable to criminal prosecution and GE liable to disqualification and blacklisting. This would amount to government procurement fraud as well as a federal offence of forging a government document.
I complained that GE was paying bribes to Indian government officials through a third party contractor called Aartech Consultants. This would amount to US federal offences under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
I complained that GE had hired as consultant, a former Government official and advisor, Vinod Sharma and this constituted a violation of the tender documents and amounted to a corrupt practice as defined in the tender documents.
I complained of other corrupt contact between GE employees and Indian officials for the purposes of these tender bids. GE employees and attorneys based in the US were aware of and were party to such corrupt contact.
I complained of harassment, retaliation, and intimidation at GE and that I was drugged while I was still at GE. I complained of violation of whistleblower laws.
GE’s US attorneys and Gibson Dunn attorneys used the pretence of an internal GE investigation to corruptly cover up the various illegalities listed before. Such cover-up in itself amounts to independent and separate offences under US federal law and Indian municipal law.
I was threatened by Mr. Jeffrey Eglash during a phone conversation in January 2011. Mr. Eglash attempted to pressurize me into giving up my complaints.
I have complained that I was being drugged and attempts were made to poison me even between September 2010 and February 2011 while GE’s internal investigation was on.
I have complained that since February 2011 until the present, I have been drugged on numerous occasions and attempts have been made to poison me. I have been hounded and terrorized. I have received various threats from other Indian lawyers and from doctors whom I consulted when I suspected that I was being drugged/ poisoned. I have been gang-stalked. My house has been damaged and rigged to facilitate introduction of poisonous gases, toxins and chemicals. The power supply to my house was tampered with in order to damage appliances. My car brakes and AC were tampered with and car exhaust and chemicals were introduced into my car. My house has been entered into. My belongings, clothes and bedding were sprayed with chemicals/ pesticides. I have smelt nitrous oxide in my house. My phones are being hacked. My laptops were destroyed. Bugs were planted in my home. The air-conditioner in my house was tampered with. I was subjected nightly to dogs barking and howling outside my house for hours at a stretch. My car has been followed by thugs. I have been followed by thugs to the gym. Thugs have been sent to my house to intimidate me. Gangs on motorcycles have been made to circle my house to intimidate me. The local police has been corrupted and pressurized to prevent them from coming to my assistance. The police was used to illegally assault me while I was at the police headquarters asking for protection and then later drug me. I have been completely isolated as “friends”, family and neighbours have been recruited to harm me. My family has been blackmailed into denying me support and into participating in intimidation and harm using a domestic violence criminal complaint filed against them and a child custody dispute. I have been smeared as part of the campaign against me.
I tried to protect myself by withdrawing all my complaints hoping that I would be left alone. But that was not the case. Attempts were made to drug me, intimidate me and harm me even thereafter. I got the impression then that I was in even greater danger.
It is quite evident from the scale and nature of the operation against me that there is a grave threat to my life and that powerful persons at GE, including GE Officers and GE lawyers and Gibson lawyers have ordered that I be murdered/ eliminated. The powerful persons who are caught up in my complaints and who stand to lose from the truth being established include the following:
Mr. Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman -General Electric
Mr. John Rice, Vice Chairman -General Electric
Mr. John Flannery, General Electric
Mr. Brackett Denniston, General Counsel – General Electric
Mr. Alex Dimitrief , Vice President, General Electric
Mr. Jeffrey Eglash, Senior Counsel, General Electric
Mr. Karan Bhatia, Senior Counsel – General Electric
Mr. Lorenzo Simonelli, GE Transportation
Ms. Tara Plimpton, GE Transportation
Ms. James Winget, GE Transportation
Mr. Pratyush (Prat) Kumar, General Electric
Mr. Ashfaq (Ash) Nainar – General Electric
Mr. F Joseph Warin, Gibson Dunn
Mr. John Chesley, Gibson Dunn
I have appealed to the United States Government, the FBI and other US law enforcement agencies to protect me as a whistleblower and a witness to and victim of crime sponsored and ordered by US Citizens living in the United States. I believe the threat to my life originates from the persons I have named above and that they have ordered my murder/ elimination. I have made several complaints against these persons accusing them of United States federal criminal offences (and in some cases offences under Indian municipal law) which if investigated and prosecuted would not only cost these persons their jobs, their reputations and careers but would also result in criminal convictions and prison sentences. The attorneys on this list would be disbarred.
Regards,
Seema Sapra
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Seema Sapra <seema.sapra@googlemail.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 7:17 PM
Subject: Please pass on this message to the Hon’ble Richard J. Holwell, United States District Judge, Southern District of New York
To: william_donald@nysd.uscourts.gov, brett_kaufman@nysd.uscourts.gov, usanys.crcomp@usdoj.gov, NDwebmail@state.gov, askdoj@usdoj.gov
Cc: "Denniston, Brackett (GE, Corporate)" <brackett.denniston@ge.com>, kdonovan-maher@bermandevalerio.com, greg.danilow@weil.com, rcohen@lowey.com, fcpa.fraud@usdoj.gov, ffetf@usdoj.gov, newhaven@ic.fbi.gov, ny1@ic.fbi.gov, usanys.wpcomp@usdoj.gov, CleggD1@state.gov, chairmanoffice@sec.gov, help@sec.gov
Please pass on this message to the Hon’ble Richard J. Holwell, United States District Judge, Southern District of New York.
Dear Judge Richard J. Holwell,
This is in connection with my earlier communication regarding my complaint of a threat to my life on account of whistle-blower complaints that I have made against General Electric, one of which has a bearing on investor lawsuits against General Electric that were filed in your Court.
I have described in great detail the attacks against me that have taken place over the last year and a half. I have provided this information to law enforcement authorities both in India and in the United States. I would like to bring this information to your knowledge as well. Please see my letter addressed to the Legal Attache in the United States Embassy here in New Delhi which is attached herewith.
I also fear that contacting your office last week has resulted in retaliatory intimidation and harm to me. Since the night of January 13, 2012 some kind of toxic substances have been introduced into my house. I have smelt an unpleasant chemical and it has caused symtoms like stinging in the eyes, head-aches and respiratory symptoms. I have also intermittently smelt some other gas which could be nitrous oxide or something else. I have repeatedly complained about this to the local Police here and they have taken no action.
I fear for my life. I request that you intervene in this matter as the threat arises on account of my complaint about obstruction of justice and evidence tampering by General Electric in connection with lawsuits filed in your Court.
With Regards,
Seema Sapra
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Seema Sapra <seema.sapra@googlemail.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 8:15 PM
Subject: Re: Please pass on this message to the Hon’ble Richard J. Holwell, United States District Judge, Southern District of New York
To: william_donald@nysd.uscourts.gov, brett_kaufman@nysd.uscourts.gov, usanys.crcomp@usdoj.gov, NDwebmail@state.gov, askdoj@usdoj.gov
Cc: "Denniston, Brackett (GE, Corporate)" <brackett.denniston@ge.com>, kdonovan-maher@bermandevalerio.com, greg.danilow@weil.com, rcohen@lowey.com, fcpa.fraud@usdoj.gov, ffetf@usdoj.gov, newhaven@ic.fbi.gov, ny1@ic.fbi.gov, usanys.wpcomp@usdoj.gov, CleggD1@state.gov, chairmanoffice@sec.gov, help@sec.gov
Please pass on this message to the Hon’ble Richard J. Holwell, United States District Judge, Southern District of New York.
Dear Judge Richard J. Holwell,
I am sending some correspondence that took place between me and General Electric and others on the subject of my complaint that GE was hiding evidence that established that GE Officers knew but did not publicly disclose that a mullti-billion dollar tender bid (that they had told investors about in a public forum) failed sometime between February 16, 2009 and February 23, 2009.
Thank you.
With Regards,
Seema Sapra
