The Guardian reports that due to National Security issues a major SFO investigation of BAE Systems has been halted.
A major criminal investigation into alleged corruption by the arms company BAE Systems and its executives was stopped in its tracks yesterday when the prime minister claimed it would endanger Britain’s security if the inquiry was allowed to continue.
The remarkable intervention was announced by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, who took the decision to end the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into alleged bribes paid by the company to Saudi officials, after consulting cabinet colleagues.
It would appear that the lobbying of the company and the Saudi government has finally payed off and the government has pulled the plug as it were on the inquiry. The Serious Fraud Office issued this statement.
The Attorney General had apparently consulted with the prime minister, the defence secretary, foreign secretary, and the intelligence services, and they jointly decided that “the wider public interest” “outweighed the need to maintain the rule of law”.
So BAE Systems can now in my opinion be considered above the law, but then that has seemed always to have been the way when it comes to British arms companies, at least under the previous Conservative government.
I suppose naively I had thought that this government would be different especially given that we’ve a prime minister who once taunted his predecessor as someone “knee deep in dishonour” over an arms deal and who promised that he would be “purer than pure” in office.
I feel like one of the animals looking in at the pigs and men at the end of Animal Farm.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Edit: Garry Smith of A Big Stick and a Small Carrot apparently feels exactly the same and beat me to the punch with the quote.