Let me explain:

The Federal initiative Against new fighter aircraft (Groupe pour une Suisse sans armée (GSsA) ) lambasted BAE and Gropen International (against whom no allegations of bribery have been proven, and who must therefore be assumed to be innocent.

At the same time, they failed to point out that Dassault have been tried and convicted of bribery and corruption.

They have a track record, in other words.

Dassault may have “paid the price”, and Justice may have been done, but based on evidence and history, Dassault is known to have engaged in bribery and corruption while BAE and Gripen have not. The convicted ‘criminal’ may be assumed to be more likely to reoffend than a party with a clean record.

As to links, you can Google, if you’re bothered, but when I give names, occasions and sometimes dates, then the people being quoted are being quoted accurately.

NB: Court Judgement on the dropping of the SFO enquiry – direct quote:
“According to the Attorney General’s evidence, BAE has always contended that any payments it made were approved by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In short they were lawful commissions and not secret payments made without the consent or approval of the principal. [u]The cause of anti-corruption is not served by pursuing investigations which fail to distinguish between a commission and a bribe. It would be unfair to BAE to assume that there was a realistic possibility, let alone a probability, of proving that it was guilty of any criminal offence.[/u]”

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, announced the decision to drop the inquiry to the House of Lords on 14th December. He said:
“The Director of the Serious Fraud Office has decided to discontinue the investigation into the affairs of BAe Systems plc as far as they relate to the Al Yamamah defence contract. This decision has been taken following representations that have been made both to the Attorney General and the Director concerning the need to safeguard national and international security. It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.” You could find that in Hansard

The then chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, now Lord Sheldon, considered the report in February 1992, and said:
“I did an investigation and I find no evidence that the MOD made improper payments. I have found no evidence of fraud or corruption. The deal… complied with Treasury approval and the rules of Government accounting.” You could find that in Hansard

The quote from Howard Wheeldon of BCG is subscriber only, but I’m sure he’ll confirm it.

As to my supposedly having “been proved wrong several times about Rafale”, that’s wishful thinking on your part, chum. You just can’t accept the truth.

Glitter,

You’re accusations are empty, without foundation and utterly dishonourable. The Al Yamamah deal was not, and is not known as the “the mother of all briberies”, and there is no evidence of corruption in that deal. Indeed all of the credible evidence suggests the opposite (see Wheeldon, Sheldon, Goldsmith, the SFO, etc. above).

Grim,

”Is it really so hard to believe that the Typhoon might actually have won on the level? Are people that biased against Typhoon to see it?” You’ve hit the nail on the head.

SoC,

The point was that there was more stale, tired, Anglo-bashing in the very week that we were celebrating the 65th anniversary.

Arthuro
“just a source among many others…”

and then you quote the campaign against the Arms Trade and Cornerhouse.

(CAAT is an extreme anti-militarist, very left wing group).

That’s like using David Irving as a credible source on the holocaust.

I’ve given you direct, on the record quotes from Wardle and Goldsmith, which contradict this tosh.

“I just wanted to point out that a if you disagree with this 1h report of this standard you need to do some serious work because honestly, even with a good sens of critics, this is really a quality investigative work. So you need more than unbacked/unchecked information you gave in your previous posts…”

And you need to look a little wider, and see that there has never been any serious, creible suggestion of any wrongdoing with regard to the Saudi TYPHOON deal, all of the controversy surround Al Yamamah (Tornado/Hawk) payments to Prince Bandar, and these have been explained to you as well.

To recap:

there is NO evidence of any wrongdoing by BAE on the Typhoon sale to Saudi Arabia, and it’s thus not fair to allege otherwise.

Such allegations as there have been relate to Al Yamamah (an earlier programme), and in any case, Britain’s most senior law officer judged that there was no case to answer in the case of that earlier programme.

Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General indicated that he thought it was really unlikely there would ever be a successful prosecution, even if the SFO had been given the go-ahead to continue the probe for 18 months and delve into Swiss bank accounts connected to the Saudis.

The head of the Serious Fraud Office, Robert Wardle, said that he had come under no political pressure to drop the inquiry, and that he had made the decision independently. The SFO said that in deciding to drop the investigation, “No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.”

The judgement said: “According to the Attorney General’s evidence, BAE has always contended that any payments it made were approved by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In short they were lawful commissions and not secret payments made without the consent or approval of the principal. The cause of anti-corruption is not served by pursuing investigations which fail to distinguish between a commission and a bribe. It would be unfair to BAE to assume that there was a realistic possibility, let alone a probability, of proving that it was guilty of any criminal offence.”

BAE acted with the full knowledge and consent of both governments throughout Al Yamamah, and the payments were approved by the Ministry of Defence. This was effectively an automatic process that was “out of the company’s hands.” Howard Wheeldon, defence analyst at BGC Partners (and one of the most respected observers of defence economics and procurement), suggested that the worst that the British Government could be accused of was “a degree of naivety” and that successive governments had “no case to answer.”

The payments were written into the contract in annexes, and were probably required because Al Yamamah was originally paid for on an ‘Arms for Oil’ basis. This was not illegal either under UK corruption law nor under the US Foreign Corrupt Practises act. The money was owned by the Saudi Government, and was passed to Prince Bandar, Saudi Minister of Defence and Aviation via Saudi Ministry of Defence and Aviation (MODA) accounts that were audited annually by the Saudi ministry of finance.

Let’s run that back: Saudi Money, paid to a Saudi Minister, via Saudi MODA Accounts.

So BAE released payments with UK MoD approval and at the behest of HMG – of Saudi money, to the Saudi Minister of Defence, using Saudi MODA accounts – and that sounds to you like a shady, underhand, illegal and unauthorised bribe?

Did you ever hear of bribing someone with their own money? Of a UK Government ordering bribes to be paid? Or indeed of a bribe that was legal under the USA’s Foreign Corrupt Practises act?

Only anti-Arms trade left wing activists and a handful of French enthusiasts desperate to discredit EF GmbH are pursuing this. There’s no case to answer (according to Lord Goldsmith himself), no evidence and it has NOTHING TO DO WITH TYPHOON.

We where (SiC) discussing the German contract and the price they paid Jack. Do try to keep up.

The price paid by the partner nations is the same, excluding any national specific programmes. These are insignificant in UNIT cost terms.

Do keep up.

You sound like a fair minded chap.

The point is that there is NO evidence of any wrongdoing by BAE on the Typhoon sale to Saudi Arabia, and it’s thus not fair to allege otherwise.

Such allegations as there have been relate to an earlier programme, and in any case, Britain’s most senior law officer judged that there was no case to answer in the case of that earlier programme.

Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General indicated that he thought it was really unlikely there would ever be a successful prosecution, even if the SFO had been given the go-ahead to continue the probe for 18 months and delve into Swiss bank accounts connected to the Saudis.

The head of the Serious Fraud Office, Robert Wardle, said that he had come under no political pressure to drop the inquiry, and that he had made the decision independently. The SFO said that in deciding to drop the investigation, “No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.”

The judgement said: “According to the Attorney General’s evidence, BAE has always contended that any payments it made were approved by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In short they were lawful commissions and not secret payments made without the consent or approval of the principal. The cause of anti-corruption is not served by pursuing investigations which fail to distinguish between a commission and a bribe. It would be unfair to BAE to assume that there was a realistic possibility, let alone a probability, of proving that it was guilty of any criminal offence.”

BAE acted with the full knowledge and consent of both governments throughout Al Yamamah, and the payments were approved by the Ministry of Defence. This was effectively an automatic process that was “out of the company’s hands.” Howard Wheeldon, defence analyst at BGC Partners (and one of the most respected observers of defence economics and procurement), suggested that the worst that the British Government could be accused of was “a degree of naivety” and that successive governments had “no case to answer.”

The payments were written into the contract in annexes, and were probably required because Al Yamamah was originally paid for on an ‘Arms for Oil’ basis. This was not illegal either under UK corruption law nor under the US Foreign Corrupt Practises act. The money was owned by the Saudi Government, and was passed to Prince Bandar, Saudi Minister of Defence and Aviation via Saudi Ministry of Defence and Aviation (MODA) accounts that were audited annually by the Saudi ministry of finance.

Let’s run that back: Saudi Money, paid to a Saudi Minister, via Saudi MODA Accounts.

So there was no BAE bribery, and the programme in which bribery was alleged was not the Typhoon deal.

Imagine the howls of protest if we accused Dassault of trying to bribe the Indians to buy Rafale. In fact that would be less unfair since there is at least historical evidence of proven bribery by Dassault (not just unproven and discredited allegations).

You may think that BAE are not ‘pure’ but to allege bribery without evidence (and in the face of huge amounts of evidence to the contrary) is simply unsporting and unfair.

Glitter,

OK the South Korean bribe was small (though $8,000 buys a decent dinner!).

But $200 m goes quite a long way in Pakistan.

And they didn’t sentence Serge to two years imprisonment for no reason.

“We were talking of bribe related to Mirage, Gripen and Typhoon…”

Well, no we weren’t. Arthuro started off talking about alleged bribes relating to Gripen (there have at least been such allegations) and about Typhoon.

Trouble is that the major bribery story Arthuro was droning on about related to Saudi Arabia. Where the allegation is about bribes relating to Al Yamamah, which has nothing at all to do with Typhoon.

One of the usual French suspects started yet another thread whose primary purpose was to bash the Brits and to bash Typhoon, repeating offensive, unproven and unfounded allegations, and citing discredited sources while failing to pick up that the SFO enquiry was into Al Yamamah (eg Tornado, not Typhoon).

After some light-hearted replies the same poster repeated further unproven and offensive and implicitely anti-British accusations.

I responded with factual points, warning that a Rafale fanboy (had one read the thread) wouldn’t like them.

The original poster then accused me of being naive and ridiculous, and he questioned and diminished my professional competence.

He then repeated the suggestion that the SFO enquiry had been improperly quashed.

I then posted a lengthy rejoinder pointing out recent examples of (proven!) French bribery, and explaining exactly why the points made were wrong.

I also suggested that all of the French posters here who have a ‘chip on their shoulders’ about the Brits really do need to get over it.

Or you could look a lot closer to home – to Belgium or even to some of Dassault’s historical dealings. (In March 2002, for example, Dassault Aviation was accused of corruption involving the South Korean fighter jet contract. The company denied bribing a South Korean air force colonel to improve its chances of winning the deal to build 40 aircraft. Newspapers in Seoul linked Dassault to a Won11m ($8,300) sweetener allegedly paid to the colonel in return for advice about the bidding process. In 1995, Dassault Aviation, agreed to pay Asif Zardari (Benazir Bhutto’s husband) and a Pakistani partner a $200 million commission for a $4 billion jet fighter deal that fell apart only when Bhutto’s government was dismissed. Willy Claes, the former secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was sentanced to a three-year suspended prison term Wednesday for corruption.
The court also convicted Serge Dassault, head of the Dassault Aviation company, for paying a bribe to obtain a contract to re-equip Belgian Air Force F-16 fighters with new electronics. It sentenced him to a two-year prison sentence, but suspended it.).

Nor is investigative journalism “out of my reach” – I have consulted widely about this, and have interviewed some of the principals. I judged that there was no story in relation to the Saudi Typhoon, though I retain some doubts as to the Austrian deal.

You really need to get over it.

My four points stand.

1) The alleged bribes had absolutely nothing to do with the recent Typhoon deal (Al Salam) but rather with Al Yamamah (Hawk and Tornado) in the 1980s and 90s. FACT There is no connection between Al Y II and the Typhoon deal.

The Typhoon deal is squeaky clean and entirely untainted. Opinion, but there is not one shred of evidence to the contrary.

In Al Y BAE were operating as scrupulously as they could, trying to keep on the right side of the barely perceptible line between gifts/commissions and bribes in a culture in which the giving of gifts is seen as being entirely proper and honourable – and were not engaging in outright corruption on a domestic US programme (KC-767) nor in offering bribes to influence officials in European NATO countries, where gifts are not seen in the same light at all.

2) Britain’s most senior law officer decided that there was so little evidence of any wrong-doing that there was no chance of a successful trial. FACT

The SFO said that in deciding to drop the investigation, “No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.”

The head of the Serious Fraud Office, Robert Wardle, said that he had come under no political pressure to drop the inquiry, and that he had made the decision independently

Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General indicated that he thought it was really unlikely there would ever be a successful prosecution, even if the SFO had been given the go-ahead to continue the probe for 18 months and delve into Swiss bank accounts connected to the Saudis.

Instead of using the decision to bash the Government, Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox said: “We made it clear that because of the commercial issues involved we wanted the SFO to make a rapid decision about whether to continue their inquiry or whether to bring it to an end. Having decided there is no case to answer, it will be welcomed by all those concerned.”

Paragraph 47 of the judgement reads:

“According to the Attorney General’s evidence, BAE has always contended that any payments it made were approved by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In short they were lawful commissions and not secret payments made without the consent or approval of the principal. The cause of anti-corruption is not served by pursuing investigations which fail to distinguish between a commission and a bribe. It would be unfair to BAE to assume that there was a realistic possibility, let alone a probability, of proving that it was guilty of any criminal offence. It is unfortunate that no time was taken to adopt the suggestion (referred to in evidence) to canvass with leading counsel the Attorney’s reservations as to the adequacy of the evidence.”

I’m as keen as anyone to kick BAE when it f*cks up a programme, or uses its monopolistic position to charge high prices, but kicking the company for corruption is grossly and grotesquely unfair.

BAE has tried (not always successfully, but it has tried harder than any other aerospace manufacturer I can think of) to draw a line between bribery and the kind of practises that are acceptable and legal routine in the Middle East.

I’ve personally heard senior people from BAE’s competitors praising the company’s approach to business.

One Exec from a big US manufacturer told me that: “BAE has a reputation within the industry for knowing that there is a line between bribery and the kind of gift-giving and payments to middlemen that is routine and entirely acceptable in the Middle East, and my take is that they make real efforts to stay on the right side of that line.”

BAE has an external, independent expert committee (including Lord Woolf, the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Philippa Foster Back, Director of the Institute of Business Ethics, and Sir David Walker, former chairman of Morgan Stanley) that evaluates the company’s ethics and business conduct, and is aggressively determined to prove that the company has never done anything improper when competing for and winning defence contracts.

The company has long-standing anti-corruption policies and training programmes in place, and is committed to never offering bribes or improper inducements (nor using third parties to do so) and any gift worth more than £25 has to be logged and registered, which is why their gizzits to journos are so paltry and meagre!

3) Because the Saudi deal was conducted on a government-to-government basis, with BAE acting only as a sub-contractor, any payments by BAE to Saudi were specifically authorised by the UK Government. FACT

This was a Government to Government deal, and all payments via BAE (BAE was a conduit, not a source) were approved by HMG.

If anyone was guilty of anything it was the two Governments. (That might be a heartening thought to the most Anglophobe among us, but it’s frankly not credible).

BAE acted with the full knowledge and consent of both governments throughout Al Yamamah, and the payments were approved by the Ministry of Defence. This was effectively an automatic process that was “out of the company’s hands.” Howard Wheeldon, defence analyst at BGC Partners (and one of the most respected observers of defence economics and procurement), suggested that the worst that the British Government could be accused of was “a degree of naivety” and that successive governments had “no case to answer.”

4) All Al Salam Typhoon payments and all Al Yamamah payments were authorised and legal. FACT

The payments were written into the contract (does that give you a clue?) in annexes, and were probably required because Al Yamamah was originally paid for on an ‘Arms for Oil’ basis. This was not illegal either under UK corruption law nor under the US Foreign Corrupt Practises act. The money was owned by the Saudi Government, and was passed to Prince Bandar, Saudi Minister of Defence and Aviation via Saudi Ministry of Defence and Aviation (MODA) accounts that were audited annually by the Saudi ministry of finance.

Let’s run that back: Saudi Money, paid to a Saudi Minister, via Saudi MODA Accounts.

Every payment was approved by one or both governments, and, according to Bandar, used “exclusively for purposes approved by MODA.”

Sir Raymond Lygo, a former BAE chief executive, told me at Farnborough last time around (if I remember right) that there had been no secret payments.

“There was nothing untoward about the deal whatsoever. I was the one who won the contract and I would have known if anything was going on at the time. Naturally we paid agents, but there’s nothing illegal about that. It was absolutely in accordance with the law.”

That might seem a bit ‘Mandy Rice Davies’ to anyone who doesn’t know what an upright and honest and honourable bloke Admiral Lygo is.

It seems clear to me that BAE Systems has been the subject of what appears to be a concerted campaign by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade and the Guardian newspaper, whose journalists appear to have stooped to some stunningly shabby and dirty tricks of their own, and which has published numerous articles alleging corruption by the company, and which maintains a ‘BAE Files’ microsite on its website.

The Guardian has an agenda on this, and has stooped to dirty tricks of its own in its attempts to smear BAE Systems. Posing as official investigators and distributing ‘fake’ business cards (with an address which turned out to be the Guardian’s old archive) was the tip of a shameful iceberg.

Its journos have behaved disgracefully, and with great partiality and they have reflected great discredit on the profession.

It seems pretty clear to me that the investigation was a pointless waste of money in the first place, picking over the bones of a 20 year old arms deal which was conducted pretty cleanly anyway.

But “Major arms company does exactly what the Government tells it to” isn’t much of a headline-grabbing story, I guess – and especially not if you’re some left wing toe-rag who thinks that any arms company is the devil incarnate.

This was a pointless, groundless investigation into the prime sub contractor in what was a 20 year old government to government deal. Any fair minded observer would conclude that it was obvious that BAE had done nothing wrong. This was an investigation that was looking at the wrong target, and there was (according to the attorney general, no less) no real chance of a conviction.

However, a politically motivated investigation (driven by the Guardian and CAAT, ferfuxake) and cheered on by the UK’s industrial competitors into this ancient deal, stood a very real chance of spoiling Anglo-Saudi Arabian relations.

Just when co-operation with the Saudis was most needed in the war against terror, and just as they were in the final stages of negotiating a vital aerospace deal.

And now the French are whining about it again, trying desparately to dredge up whatever old bol.locks they can to spoil the deal in Switzerland. Even though the principal allegations are against BAE while it’s EADS fronting the Swiss campaign.

If you designed better fighters, boys, perhaps they’d win on their own merits, and you wouldn’t have to stoop to such desperate tactics?