Court of Appeal yesterday ordered an Italian businessman wanted by India over the 16-year-old Bofors arms scandal to surrender his travel document - despite the fact he left the country over the weekend.

Ottavio Quattrocchi, 64, left for Italy on Saturday despite a Court of Appeal order for him to be seized and prevented from leaving Malaysia pending the hearing, prosecutor Kamarul Hisham told AFP .

Government lawyers supported by India are attempting to overturn Friday's High Court decision to deny India's extradition request.

India has been seeking Quattrocchi's extradition in relation to the 1986 scandal in which Swedish armament company Bofors allegedly paid 14.2 million dollars in bribes to clinch a weapons contract with India worth a total of 1.3 billion dollars.

Quattrocchi's counsel, Mohamad Shafee Abdullah, said that he had been instructed to fight the travel-document order.

"Quattrocchi will return to Malaysia. We will challenge the motion. We are not intimidated in any way. After Christmas he will come back. My client has got perfect confidence in the Malaysian judiciary system," he told AFP .

Bogus case

Mohamad Shafee rapped government lawyers for pursuing what he dubbed as a "bogus case."

"It is a waste of tax payers' money. We should not follow the footsteps of India. There is no basis for the extradition," he said.

Mohamad Shafee said the Court of Appeal order was a "face-saving" measure for the government lawyers.

In New Delhi, a spokesman for India's Central Bureau of Investigationsaid the order vindicated the CCBI's decision to take the decision to the Court of Appeal.

"The surrender of the passport vindicates our stand," the spokesman, G Mohanty, told private Zee Television . "We will put our stand in the Court of Appeal. All documents are already there. We are sure we will win."

The state had appealed the rejection of the extradition by a lower court, but Judge Augustine Paul said he had dismissed the prosecution's extradition application because Quattrocchi had not been charged.

India says Quattrocchi, who has been on bail since his arrest in December 2000, was an intermediary in the deal.

Political vendetta

But he says he fell foul of an Indian political vendetta and his only crime was to have been a close friend of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and his widow, Sonia.

Gandhi was assassinated in 1991, and Sonia now heads the opposition Congress party.

India's CBI has levelled charges against Quattrocchi as well as former Bofors agent Win Chadha, the British-based billionaire Hinduja brothers Srichand, Gopichand and Prakash - and former Bofors chief Martin Ardbo.

Quattrocchi lived in New Delhi until 1993 as the representative of Italian firm Snamprogretti Spa and then moved to Malaysia. AFP