NEW DELHI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has alleged that “corporate lobbyist” Deepak Talwar acted as a “middleman” in bilateral service agreements signed with West Asian countries as well as aircraft purchases by the state owned Air India.The agency today told the Court that Talwar received “exorbitant amounts” from Emirates, Air Arabia and Qatar Airways from June 2008 to February 2009.ED’s remand paper says that Talwar received “kickbacks” to the tune of 45 million US dollars in his “Bank of Singapore” account from Emirates (June to November 2008). Also, he allegedly received 1.5 crore US dollars from Qatar and Air Arabia (June 2008 to Feb 2009). ED has also given details of the accounts “directly or indirectly” controlled by Khaitan which received the payments.It has said that the said payments received were “very near to the time of signing of the respective” bilateral agreements. It added that the said payments were “not usual business transactions” and the same were “basically proceeds of crime”. Talwar was remanded to seven days custody of ED. The agency had registered a case in May 2017 on charges of abuse of power by public servants who allegedly received kickbacks to make the national carrier give up profit making routs and profit making timings of Air India in favour of national and international domestic and foreign private airlines. This, as per the agency, resulted in huge loss of market share to Air India and pecuniary benefits to private domestic and foreign airlines.Investigation has revealed that discussions were held between India and UAE separately for Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Ras-al-Khaima. After the said meetings, the remand paper says, there was “increase in the seat entitlements for both the contracting countries and increase in points of call for foreign carriers”. It adds “the foreign carriers obtained more points of call each time causing loss to Air India (AI)”. Further, it (AI) could not utilise its seat entitlement in the optimum capacity, it adds. The detailED special prosecutor Davinder Pal Singh said Talwar’s custody is needed to ascertain his role in “association with the bilateral air service talks and the inroads made by him to influence the decisions”. He added “role of key persons and their modus operandi” needs to be extracted from Talwar. He claimed that the agency has received “voluminous incriminating material” against Talwar.In a related development, co-accused in the VVIP chopper deal, Dubai based businessman Rajiv Saxena was remanded to four days custody. The duo were brought to India Wednesday night from Dubai.ED said that Rajiv Saxena was “key money launderer” who along with associate lawyer Gautam Khaitan “was instrumental in circulation of payment of kickbacks”. The agency has alleged that Saxena’s Mauritius based company (Interstellar Technologies) laundered around 12.4 million euros which were paid as kickbacks in the AgustaWestland deal.It is further alleged that Saxena, on the asking of Khaitan, set up shell companies across the world to launder money and to project kickbacks as “untainted” money. The agency seeks to ascertain how the “kickbacks were routed and laundered” and were “placed, layered and integrated into the system”.