BAE Systems

[Jan Klimkowski]

The decision is a farce - a plea bargain blood money payment to prevent the truth coming out in open court.

Tony Blair endorsed and backed this blatant looting of Tanzania as British PM, and is now getting his payback in highly lucrative consultancies from numerous financial entities.

Of course plea bargains form no part of the British legal system - well, they didn't, until yesterday. :eviltongue:

BAE deal with Tanzania: Military air traffic control – for country with no airforce

Claire Short and Robin Cook had tried to stop the sale of a hugely expensive radar to the poverty- stricken Tanzanians

Tony Blair was at the centre of controversy over BAE's arms deal with Tanzania, just as he was in the Saudi contracts.

Cabinet ministers Claire Short and Robin Cook had tried to stop the sale of the hugely expensive radar to the poverty- stricken Tanzanians. But, as prime minister, he overruled them and insisted that the deal had to go through.

It left Cook ruefully muttering that it seemed that Dick Evans, BAE's then chairman, seemed to have "the key to the garden door of No 10".

The World Bank and the International Civil Aviation Organisation judged that the 2001 purchase was unnecessary and overpriced.

But the £28m deal started to look even worse when the SFO discovered that a third of the contract's price had been diverted into secret offshore bank accounts.

The SFO believed that this money was used to pay bribes to Tanzanian politicians and officials.

Yesterday Short, who resigned from the government, said : "Every way you looked at it, it [the deal] was outrageous and disgraceful. And guess who absolutely insisted on it going through? My dear friend Tony Blair, who absolutely, adamantly, favoured all proposals for arms deals.

"It was an obviously corrupt project. Tanzania didn't need a new military air traffic control, it was out-of-date technology, they didn't have any military aircraft – they needed a civilian air traffic control system and there was a modern, much cheaper one. Everyone talks about good governance in Africa as though it is an African problem, and often the roots of the 'badness' is companies in Europe."

In Yesterday's agreement with the SFO, BAE admitted one offence under the 1985 Companies Act relating to the Tanzanian contract.

Dick Olver, the chairman, admitted that BAE "made commission payments to a marketing adviser and failed to accurately record such payments in its accounting records ... The company failed to scrutinise these records adequately to ensure that they were reasonably accurate and permitted them to remain uncorrected."

The SFO discovered that the money had gone into a Swiss bank account controlled by Sailesh Vithlani, a middleman of Indian extraction with a British passport.

He left Tanzania after the country's anti-corruption unit accused of lying to investigators. He is listed as wanted by Interpol.

One Tanzanian politician, Andrew Chenge, was forced to resign in 2008 after investigators discovered more than £500,000 in a Jersey bank account he controlled. He denied the money had come from BAE.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb...-arms-deal