Estonian committee seeks records on Datasel and ARCA contacts
Monday 28th September 2026 on 21:30 in
Estonia
Estonia’s parliamentary anti-corruption committee has asked the state Defence Investment Centre and the Defence Ministry for all correspondence concerning contacts with India’s Datasel and Turkish ammunition producer ARCA Defence, ERR reported.
The committee made the decision by consensus at a closed meeting on Monday, chair Anastassia Kovalenko-Kõlvart told ERR. It wants to examine how the contacts began and what followed.
Kovalenko-Kõlvart said the request followed comments by Defence Investment Centre director Elmar Vaher that the correspondence might not be important and that collecting it would be a major task. The committee has not yet been able to review the records. It gave the centre and ministry until October 12 to respond.
The committee also discussed with Chief State Prosecutor Astrid Asi an investigation led by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office into transactions between the centre and Datasel, as well as a separate proceeding opened by the State Prosecutor’s Office in 2025.
Kovalenko-Kõlvart said she wanted to know how the investigations would proceed and whether they could lead to charges. She also raised the possibility of a criminal offence related to information given to parliament about procurement risks.
According to Kovalenko-Kõlvart, documents reviewed by the committee showed that budget bills for 2024, 2025 and 2026 stated that intermediary agreements posed no risk to the state budget. She said committee records indicated that the Defence Investment Centre and Defence Ministry leadership knew of risks. She plans to raise the matter with Finance Minister Jürgen Ligi and said the committee may also alert the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The Defence Investment Centre signed a contract worth about 70 million euros with Datasel S.R.L. in 2024 to buy ammunition for Ukraine. The centre paid millions of euros in advance, but it later emerged that the company had never sold a shell. Instead, it provided further promises, ERR reported.