The stench of corruption in the long-running BAE saga over the al-Yamamah and other massive arms deals is almost suffocating, and now to cap it all BAE (for the moment at least) has escaped criminal prosecution. Just about everything in this episode stinks:
* Kickbacks for securing these gigantic deals (£43bn revenue to BAE for the Saudi deal) were channelled through offshore shell entities to disguise where these payments came from and who to, as MOD defence sales must have been aware,
* The SFO corruption inquiry launched in 2004 revealed huge sums paid into Swiss bank accounts associated with middlemen like the Syrian billionaire Wafic Said, a close friend of the Thatcher family, but as the Swiss prepared to disclose bank records to the SFO which might implicate the Saudi royal family, Blair ordered Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, in a secret and personal letter to stop the investigation,
* The inquiry was then only resurrected when the US Justice Department discovered that BAE had been paying Prince Bandar, son of the Saudi Defence Minister, over £1bn through the previous decade in £30m quarterly payments, apparently through an MOD account, yet the British government refused to hand over documents about these Bandar payments, no doubt because Ministers had been insisting for 20 years that there had been no secret commission payments,
* Other BAE deals now being uncovered include the sale of hugely expensive radar to poverty-stricken Tanzania, with a third of the £28m contract price now revealed to have been diverted into secret offshore bank accounts, yet the deal was forced through by Blair who, in the words of Clare Short, “absolutely, adamantly, favoured all proposals for arms deals”.

The implications for this whole saga are truly shocking, both the disreputable suppression by a Prime Minister of an official inquiry into massive corporate corruption and the repeated denial of any corruption or wrongdoing by BAE which is now revealed as a deliberate and persistent evasion of justice. But the pursuit of BAE must not stop here. It is a travesty of justice that BAE has, at a cost to them of a mere £300m which is small change to the company, been allowed to escape conviction for corruption and merely confessed to ‘false accounting’.
The other corruption allegations against BAE regarding arms deals with Somania, South Africa, and the Czech Republic as well as Tanzania should now be vigorously pursued by the SFO. The US Justice Department should also pursue further the Bandar payments and where those leads point. And Parliament, in the light of the Wright select committee recommendations, should now establish its own Commission of Inquiry (since the Government will certainly block any idea of its own judicial inquiry) into the knowledge and involvement of government in any of the corruption underlying any of these arms deals, to remefy the manifest and abject failure of governance in stamping out corruption over the last 25 years.

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