France and India on Thursday each dismissed security concerns raised by the recent publication of documents involving Scorpene-class submarines currently being constructed in Mumbai by a French naval contractor.
The documents — more than 22,000 pages pertaining to a fleet of subs being built by DCNS of Paris for the Indian Navy — were first published Wednesday in the Australian press.
Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar initially told reporters that the publication appeared to be the result of a “hacking” incident, and a spokeswoman for DCNS told Reuters Wednesday that the contractor may have been the victim of “economic espionage.”
As an multinational investigation into the publication takes shape, however, individuals familiar with the matter have raised begun raising doubts about the seriousness of the documents’ disclosure.
“The documents that have been posted … have been examined and do not pose any security compromise as the vital parameters have been blacked out,” the Indian Defense Ministry said in a statement Thursday, Reuters reported.
Separately, an unnamed source within the French government added to Reuters that the documents were likely stolen from DCNS in 2011 by a former employee who has since been fired, and only appear to concern unclassified operational aspects of the vessels.
“It is not a leak, it is theft,” the anonymous source told Reuters. “We have not found any DCNS negligence, but we have identified some dishonesty by an individual.”
The Australian investigative journalist who broke the story, Cameron Stewart, has since said that he believes the documents were leaked by a French DCNS employee in 2011.
“I have had no evidence that this is some sort of deliberate plan to sabotage the French company by a competitor. It may be the case, but I have no evidence,” Mr. Cameron said in an interview this week with The Hindu.
Australia hired DCNS earlier this year to build a fleet of sophisticated Barracuda next-generation subs for its military — the country’s most expensive defense contract ever at roughly $38 billion.
“The matters in connection to India have no bearing on the Australian submarine program, which operates under the Australian government’s arrangements for the protection of sensitive data,” a DCNS spokeswoman told BBC this week.
The fleet of six Scorpene submarines being built for India at a Mumbai shipyard were ordered from DCNS at a cost of roughly $3.5 billion in 2005 and are expected to enter service later this year, The Register reported.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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