More details are emerging of UK Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith's outrageous decision just before Christmas to pull the plug on an investigation into massive corruption by arms-dealer BAE. It seems that Goldsmith believed there was enough evidence to bring a case - but changed his mind after pressure from Downing Street:
In emergency meetings before Christmas, Lord Goldsmith initially agreed with lawyers and prosecutors that the Serious Fraud Office could bring charges against the former head of BAE Sir Dick Evans.The allegations involved backdoor gifts to the then head of the Saudi air force, Prince Turki-bin-Nasser.
Having reviewed the SFO's files, Lord Goldsmith agreed that BAE could, in effect, be offered a plea bargain in which investigators would drop further potentially politically embarrassing inquiries if the company agreed to plead guilty to these relatively minor charges.
But within 48 hours the agreement was countermanded after decisions taken in Downing St, Whitehall sources said.
The director of the SFO, Robert Wardle, was forbidden to make the approach to BAE. Instead the attorney general told parliament the entire Saudi investigation was to be halted, and that there was insufficient evidence for it to succeed.
As Anthony Lester points out, this is not the first time Goldsmith has proven to be "flexible" about the law when pressured by Blair - there's also his famous change of heart over the legality of the Iraq war, which again was kept from Parliament. Once may just be bad judgement, but twice is a pattern - and a deeply troubling one. The Attorney-General is supposed to be independent in their decision making, but Goldsmith has clearly made decisions on political grounds, and shaped his arguments to suit what the Prime Minister wanted to hear rather than providing independent legal advice. That is bad enough, but it is worse when you remember that Blair and senior Labour figures are currently under investigation in the cash for peerages scandal - and that it is Goldsmith who will be making the final decision as to whether to prosecute them. Given his past behaviour, can the British public really have any faith that he will apply the law impartially to his colleagues? Or that a declaration that there is "insufficient evidence" is not just another case of a compromised Attorney-General bowing to political expediency? I don't think so.
2 comments:
It's all a massive can of worms:
- BAe are not a conventional private company. A huge proportion of their business is with the British state, who exercise a high level of control over how the company is run. You could think of them as a state controlled company with private equity investment.
- The UK government is under a tacit obligation to give most of its defence work to BAe. Most of the risk on projects ends up with the UK taxpayer rather than the contractor. Selling weapons overseas offsets some of the cost of these projects - and thus is regarded as a priority by the UK government.
- The Saudis (in particular) are utterly corrupt and use weapons purchases as a way to garner bribe money into their personal accounts.
- The process of bribing the Saudis involves various fixers and middlemen, who take a large cut of the bribes. Mark Thatcher was one of these, as was Jonathan Aitken (who wound up going to jail for perjury as a result of this murk).
- Margaret Thatcher, who prior to becoming an MP was a junior research scientist and middling lawyer, is now extremely wealthy.
So to summarise, public money was being used to bribe foreign princes, with a rakeoff from the bribes finding its way back to ministers in the previous Tory government. It's hard to see how you could get more corrupt than that.
Now you would have thought that the Labour party would be eager to publicise all this - the fact that they are not raises an obvious question as to what is *still* going on?
Posted by Rich : 2/02/2007 10:40:00 AM
The cartoon in the Guardian on Cash-for-Honours is pertinent to this too, and quite humourous with it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,,2003267,00.html
Posted by Anonymous : 2/02/2007 11:53:00 AM
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