Tony Blair as bad as Bush family in bribing Saudis

Lord Goldsmith 'hid £1bn BAE arms payments'
By George Jones, Political Editor
08/06/2007
Telegraph UK

The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, today denied ordering British investigators to conceal from an international anti-bribery watchdog more than £1 billion in secret payments allegedly made to a Saudi prince.

Lord Goldsmith denies he ordered payments to be concealed

The payments were allegedly received by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States, from BAE Systems for setting up the £40 billion Al Yamamah arms deal in the 1980s with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence.

The Guardian reported that when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) - the world's anti-corruption watchdog - tried to look into the deal earlier this year, the details were not disclosed by British officials.

Lord Goldsmith today strongly denied that he had been responsible for ordering the information to be withheld.

"It is absolutely untrue that I ordered investigators to conceal payments from the OECD. It is categorically denied,'' he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

Lord Goldsmith, however, flatly refused to discuss the allegations concerning the payments - including claims that they continued after Labour came to power in 1997.

"I am not going into the detail of any of the individual allegations,'' he said.

"The reason is, as the Ministry of Defence has made clear and they are the responsible department, that they regard the United Kingdom as bound by confidentiality provisions. It is not for me to break those.''

Prince Bandar has "categorically'' denied receiving any improper payments and BAE said it had acted lawfully at all times.

The payments, which were allegedly made with the knowledge of the Ministry of Defence, were discovered during a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation.

The SFO inquiry into the Al Yamamah deal was stopped in December and the OECD subsequently launched its own investigation.

Prince Bandar has close ties with the current US administration

It remains unclear whether the payments were actually illegal - though questions have been raised over whether they continued after 2001, when the UK made bribery of foreign officials an offence.

On Thursday Tony Blair, who has taken "responsibility" for the decision to halt the inquiry, declined to comment on the payments.

But he said that if the SFO investigation into BAE had not been dropped, it would have led to "the complete wreckage of a vital strategic relationship and the loss of thousands of British jobs''.

An inquiry by Panorama claimed that up to £120 million a year was secretly paid by BAE into accounts in the US for more than a decade.

In a statement, BAE said that all the information on the contract had been available to the SFO. "After an exhaustive investigation it was found, notwithstanding the issue of relations with Saudi, that there was no case to answer.

"We are very clear that it was a government-to-government contract and any payments relating to the contract would have been made with the express approval of the UK and Saudi governments."