Neither the Ministry of Defence nor British Aerospace properly accounted for nearly £1bn paid by the MoD to the arms company as part of the al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, according to a National Audit Office (NAO) investigation kept secret for 17 years.
The Sunday Telegraph published details of the NAO findings on 15 November, based on correspondence it had seen between the NAO and the MoD.
The NAO also criticised as “irregular” a £30.3 million management fee paid to BAe (now BAE Systems), despite the fact that there was no “legal or contractual obligation” to do so. Incidentally, an MoD manual on keeping secrets was recently leaked to the Wikileaks website: < ahref=“http://www.tinyurl.com/peacenews191”>www.tinyurl.com/peacenews191
Topics: Arms trade