The secret deal behind Megrahi’s release

[Magda Hassan]

Negotiations on the deal to free Megrahi, who stood to embarass the British and U.S. governments with new evidence of his innocence if the appeal of his conviction had gone forward, began last October after two major Scottish banks, Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), collapsed. After HSBC and Barclays made overtures to the Bank of England to buy HBOS and RBS, the proposals were rejected by what is known in Whitehall as the “Larnarkshire Mafia” -- Brown, Darling, and Martin -- that intervened in the Scottish financial crisis and ordered that public money via commercial funds be used to prop up HBOS and RBS. Eventually, Lloyds TSB bought HBOS creating Lloyds Banking Group, which was, itself, later bailed out by the British government.
The word from Whitehall is that, although Parliament is in summer recess, senior staffers know that a major secret deal was worked out between Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street (the residences of the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, respectively) and Qaddafi and sealed after a meeting two weeks ago between Mandelson and Qaddafi’s son, Saif al Islam Qaddafi, at a Rothschild family-owned villa on Corfu.
The deal worked out is that profits realized from future oil and gas deals between Britain and Libya will be used to bail out the Scottish banks. As for speculation that Labor wants to use the Scottish financial crisis to prove that current plans by the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP) government to move Scotland toward independence and that Scotland cannot fare on its own without London. Brown and Salmond, a former RBS senior economist who negotiated Scotland North Sea oil revenue spending plans between RBS and the government while working for the bank, are on very close terms, according to our sources. Brown, a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Salmond knew exactly what they were getting in return from Qaddafi and his son when they hammered out the “bailout-for-Megrahi” agreement -- the financial bailout of Scotland’s two largest banks that were riddled with toxic bad loans by sweetheart oil and gas deals with Libya. Qaddafi was celebrating more than Megrahi’s release at the public ceremony in Libya -- the mercurial Libyan leader, once considered a pariah, is now one of the most influential business moguls in Great Britain -- on both sides of Hadrian’s Wall.

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