Corruption is a Crime

There is an EDM (Early Day Motion - a sort of Parliamentary petition which MPs can sign) about the Al Yamamah / BAE investigation which the Government axed.

You can check if your MP has signed it yet at http://tinyurl.com/2abq9e

If they haven’t, you can easily contact them via www.writetothem.com urging them to sign it. Don’t worry if you haven’t lobbied an MP before or don’t know who your MP is; this site will take you through finding out who they are and contacting them. You just enter your postcode and type in a short message.

If only everything in live was that easy!

The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, which includes Labour MPs, has heavily criticised the decision to drop the investigation into BAE, alleged bribes and the Al Yamamah arms deal:

We conclude that the Government’s decision to halt the [Al Yamamah] inquiry … may have caused severe damage to the reputation of the UK in the fight against corruption.

You can read more about the story in The Independent.

The Financial Times reports today that the United States made a “formal diplomatic protest to the British government” over the decision to abandon the Serious Fraud Office’s investigation into BAE’s export sales to Saudi Arabia.

Diplomatic insiders told the Financial Times that Washington said the British decision put the Blair government in breach of both the spirit and the letter of the OECD anti-corruption convention that requires member states to have a “level playing field” in which to conduct commercial relations.

The Labour Government have repeatedly cited national security implications as the justification for ending the investigation. According the the FT:

The US said this was in sharp contrast to the 1977 US law, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which was behind US-led moves during the 1990s to secure international agreement on the OECD convention. “What we are really asking is how do we protect the integrity of the [anti-corruption] convention,” said a US official. Washington wants Britain to give a full explanation of its decisions at the OECD.

The full story is on ft.com whilst Ming Campbell’s reaction is on the Liberal Democrat website.

That’s the headline on the front page of today’s Guardian:

The UK is covertly trying to oust the head of the world’s main anti-bribery watchdog to prevent criticism of ministers and Britain’s biggest arms company, BAE, the Guardian has learned.

The effort to remove Mark Pieth comes as his organisation has stepped up its investigation into the British government’s decision to kill off a major inquiry into allegations that BAE paid massive bribes to land Saudi arms deals.

British diplomats are seeking to remove Professor Pieth, a Swiss legal expert who chairs the anti-corruption watchdog of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), claiming he is too outspoken.

The full story is on the Guardian website.

A judicial review into the dropping of the Al Yamamah corruption investigation has moved a step nearer.

The Campaign Against the Arms Trade has taken legal action against BAE to find out how BAE got hold of confidential internal legal documents from the organisation.

It now turns out that BAE employed a former Conservative councillor to gather information on CAAT and it was he who passed on the confidential legal documents. The full story is in The Guardian.

In a belated attempt to improve its image, BAE’s latest annual report includes a much expanded section on how ethical (it claims) its behaviour is, and in this new spirit admits that 50 staff have been dismissed in the last year for unethical behaviour. It’s all quiet on the Al Yamamah front though in BAE’s world; they may be feeling the pressure to clean up their act, but the pressure hasn’t quite got to that level yet.