Minister stonewalls on Bandar's £1bn

Browne refuses to say if secret payments continue
· Lib Dem leader calls for investigation

Des Browne, the defence secretary, yesterday refused point-blank to say whether his department's £1bn backdoor payments to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia for arms deals were still continuing. Visibly uneasy and irritated at a lunch with defence journalists, he claimed "national security" was the reason for his silence.

He also refused to say whether he or his predecessors were aware of the payments allegedly processed by MoD officials and wired to an American bank via the arms firm BAE as an integral part of Britain's biggest arms deal. "I am not going to discuss the detail of these confidential contracts for the very reason it would generate the consequences we do not want to generate," he said.

...


The Liberal Democrats' leader, Menzies Campbell, last night criticised Mr Browne's silence. "We need a full investigation to determine whether the Ministry of Defence has been directly involved in processing payments to Prince Bandar. The department's failure to clarify this issue is unacceptable. We need to know whether any payments took place after 2002 and whether they breached anti-corruption legislation. If it appears the law has been broken then it would be a matter for the police."

If the funds continued past 2002, when Britain outlawed payments by firms to overseas public officials to gain contracts, they might have been contrary to the Blair government's own much-trumpeted legislation. Jeremy Carver, a lawyer and board member of Transparency International, told BBC Panorama this week: "Those payments, on the face of it, are straightforward bribes as defined by the OECD anti-bribery convention ... it's quite plain that he meets the test of who is a foreign official for the purpose of the OECD convention."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2101552,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

Bandar Bush strikes again.....