Money, oil and planes. (But don't mention the corruption.)
December the 14th 2006 will rightly go down as one of the most shameful days in Britain's recent political history. Not only was the prime minister of this country questioned by the police, which 10 Downing Street did everything in its power to knock down the news agenda, but it was also the day chosen by the Attorney General to announce to the Lords that he was ordering the dropping of the Serious Fraud Office's investigation into allegations that BAE Systems had been keeping a slush fund through which it paid for Saudi officials' Rolls-Royces, Californian holidays and prostitutes.That, it seems, may well have been the tip of the iceberg. Both the Guardian and Panorama are now alleging that the SFO investigation had discovered that one of the Saudi princes involved in signing the initial Al-Yamamah deal has since then been paid somewhere in the region of a staggering £1bn by BAe in quarterly payments to Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud's account at Riggs bank in Washington.
Every single thing that the Saudi royal family stands for and imposes on the country it despotically reigns over ought to be completely inimical to the Labour party. This is a nation which still carries out beheadings in public, discriminates against women in a way highly similar to that which was given as one of the reasons for why removing the Taliban from Afghanistan was justified, and carries out torture as a matter of course against anyone suspected of more or less anything, something which four British men experienced firsthand. Speaking after their failed attempt to hold the House of Saud to account over their treatment, Les Walker commented:
"It's all down to money and oil and planes. Don't upset the Saudis. That's the British government's view."
He couldn't have got it more right. When it comes to the possibility of causing offense to the notoriously easily upset Saudi royal family, that's something that we obviously just can't afford. This isn't you see, about a disgusting autocratic regime profiting from a British company paying huge amounts into the accounts of already stinking rich royals, let alone about interfering with the rule of law in this country, but about hurting the feelings of one of the most despicable governments on the planet. While we routinely rile the Iranian government, making numerous allegations about its closeness to militants in Iraq and Afghanistan which are completely impossible to prove, suggesting that Saudi Arabia, which we know for a fact does all in its power to export the Wahhabist ideology that highly influences the Islamic fundamentalism preached by al-Qaida, is something that we would never ever do.
Hence why Tony Blair, rather than couching his reason for why the SFO investigation was dropped in terms of the damage which the Saudis had threatened to do to the war against terror, an empty threat if there ever was one in the first place, he instead made clear that this was more to down to the fact that probing into the financial dealings of the Saudis was just something you couldn't do:
"This investigation, if it had it gone ahead, would have involved the most serious allegations in investigations being made into the Saudi royal family."
Well, you don't say. That was rather the point, was it not? In actual fact, we ought to treasure this Blair comment, for the simple reason that he's for once telling the whole truth. This wasn't anything to do with the Saudis saying they weren't going to fill us in on all the hot gossip they'd got from torturing the latest extremist it's arrested, which they would have continued providing to the CIA which would have in turn passed it on to us, it was all to do with the SFO getting far, far too close to the truth. The Saudis were in a panic back in December, sparking a hysterical campaign by those with vested issues in keeping the full details of the original dove deal coming out, fearing that the Swiss were about to give the SFO access to details of bank accounts that would have showed the corruption going all the way to the crown prince himself.
While the SFO did have evidence that the payments from the BAe slush fund had continued past the date when Labour had finally got around to making such corruption illegal in 2002, we didn't until yesterday know that the government itself was in danger of being found complicit, with Lord Goldsmith apparently panicked that all the dirty washing was about to be hung out in public, the Ministry of Defence and the government's arms sale department, the Defence Export Services Organisation, knowing full well what had been going on for nearly 20 years.
The rule of law then, let alone this government's execrable record on tackling corruption, was always going to come second. The only way that the Saudi royals are ever likely to be held accountable, at least until the oil runs out, is by their own people, and it's difficult to disagree with Ken Livingstone when he said he longed for the day when they're swinging from the lamp-posts. This government has instead done everything in its power to stop even the slightest possibility of cracks emerging in the House of Saud's facade of invulnerability.
Labels: BAe Systems, corruption, House of Saud, Prince Bandar, rule of law, Serious Fraud Office
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