Lords hush up Saudi Corruption case

The House of Lords rules that the Serious Fraud Office acted lawfully when it stopped an investigation into a Saudi arms deal.

The SFO withdrew its inquiry into the £43bn deal with BAE Systems fearing that it would threaten national security. Ministers said that the Saudi government had threatened to withdraw cooperation on security matters, the BBC reported.

Back in April, the High Court had ruled that this was unlawful, but the Law Lords have reversed that decision on appeal voting 5-0 in favor of the SFO appeal. This is while the campaign group Justice said the Law Lords had delivered "a disappointingly narrow judgment".

"It is a sad day for the rule of law when a senior prosecutor bows to threats from a foreign government and our most senior judges will do nothing to stop it," said justice's director of human rights policy Eric Metcalfe.

The al-Yamamah deal with Saudi Arabia was originally signed in 1985 but continued well into the 1990s and involved BAE selling Tornado and Hawk jets, other weapons and long-running maintenance and training contracts.

Tornado jets

BAE was accused of illegal payments to Saudi officials, but the defense company has always maintained that it acted legally. Then, in December 2006, the then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, announced that the SFO was suspending its inquiry into the deal, saying that it would have caused "serious damage" to UK-Saudi relations which would lead to a threat to national security.

If the anti-fraud agency had lost its appeal in the House of Lords, it would've had to consider reopening the inquiry into claims that BAE ran a 60 million-pound "slush fund" to persuade Saudi officials as part of the 42 billion pound al-Yamamah arms deal.

Among the threats that the Saudis had used was to cancel a 10 billion-pound contract to buy 72 Eurofighter jets from BAE - the deal was signed after the inquiry was dropped - but the then Prime Minister Tony Blair and the fraud office denied basing the decision on commercial grounds. BBC-Press TV