A Saudi prince received secret payments from the
UK's biggest arms dealer, a BBC investigation has revealed
Arms deals
with the Saudis have been worth billions to the UK
BAE Systems
made regular payments of hundreds of millions
of pounds to Prince Bandar bin Sultan for more than a
decade.
The payments were made with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence *1.
Prince Bandar would not
comment and BAE systems said they acted lawfully at all times. The MoD said
information about the Al Yamamah deal was confidential.
The Prince served for 20 years
as Saudi ambassador to the US.
Warplane deal
Up to £120m
a year was sent by BAE from the UK into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington
for more than a decade.
There wasn't a distinction between the
accounts of the embassy or official government accounts
David Caruso
American bank investigator
The BBC's Panorama programme has
established that these accounts were actually a conduit to Prince Bandar, the
architect of the 1980s Al Yamamah deal to sell warplanes to Saudi.
The
purpose of one of the accounts was to pay the expenses of the Prince's private Airbus.
David
Caruso, an investigator who worked for the American bank where the accounts were
held, said Prince Bandar had been taking money for his own personal use out of accounts that
seemed to belong to his government.
He said: "There wasn't a distinction
between the accounts of the embassy, or official government accounts as we would
call them, and the accounts of the royal family."
Mr Caruso said he
understood this had been going on for "years
and years".
"Hundreds of thousands and millions of
dollars were involved," he added.
Investigation stopped
According to Panorama's sources, the payments were written into the
arms deal contract in secret annexes, described as "support services" *2.
They were authorised
on a quarterly basis by the MoD.
The payments were discovered during a
Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation.
The SFO inquiry into the Al
Yamamah deal was stopped in December 2006.
Prime Minister Tony Blair
said at the time it had been dropped because of national security concerns.
With acknowledgements to James
Oliver and BBC News.
*1This has been
British Aerospace's. business model since after World War II.
The United
Kingdom had to re-arm itself after six years of war with the Germans and
Italians and therefore had to enlarge its defence industry.
After this
was complete in the Fifties and Sixties the UK found itself sitting with a
defence industry with hundreds of thousands of employees and a large capital
base. It could not just be dumped.
So, they looked South for markets and,
of course, immediately came up against fierce competition from the USA and also
France. Especially the US had armed not only itself prior, during and after
WWII, but had also effectively re-armed the UK when things were going really
badly in those desperate 1940 to 1942 years and then for the final big push
first to Paris then to Berlin from 1943 (planning and preparation) to
1945.
But the Americans had the advantages of bigger volume production
and more effectively designed and qualified products and so they were better and
less expensive.
So how does one complete in such a harsh playing field?
It's called splodging the wonga.
And it happened just about
everywhere the British Aerospace market executives touched down, inter alia :
Malaysia;
Saudi Arabia;
Hungary;
Czech Republic;
Poland;
Tanzania;
Zimbabwe; and
South Africa.
*2The "comrades" from
across the giant anti-tank ditch soon felt the same kind of pressure and
invented the Service Provider Agreement.
And the rest is pretty much
an unfolding pantomime which will leave runny boiled egg yolk on the ruddy faces
of many a politician and other wonga splodgers.