Fraud and Corruption on UK arms contracts

At the AGM in November 2007, the Chairman of Transparency International talked about how international institutions view the UK. He said that there is a growing perception that its impossible to prosecute anyone for corruption in UK, because the system is so corrupt. My experience is that the situation with military spending is even worse; its impossible to get a proper criminal investigation into fraud and corruption on military contracts. This is because the Ministry of Defence has its own police force and controls all such investigations. No organisation which is accused of a crime should ever be allowed to control the investigation into itself.

My name is Robert McCartney. I joined the defence industry in 1979. In 2000 I resigned and reported several frauds to the MOD Police. The Observer published an article about this at the time (See BAe faces MoD fraud inquiry. This article did not mention the more serious crimes I reported. The Observer, and other large news organisations, are afraid to publish them. Despite their enormous financial resources, they could be ruined by a defamation suit, even if they ultimately won. Because of the threat of being sued for defamation, I am restricting what I say mainly to what can be proved from publicly available sources. This is a small fraction of what I told the MOD Police. I hope this is enough to convince you that:

serious fraud is widespread on UK government arms procurement contracts
published information shows that government ministers from both main parties lied to cover up massive fraud on a UK government arms procurement contract
MOD civil servants committed a criminal offence by giving deliberately misleading evidence to MOD Police investigating the frauds I reported
the MOD Police refused to do anything about this because “we work for the MOD, we're part of the MOD” and “as long as they're happy, that's all we care about”.

I want TI to publicly call for some other force to carry out an impartial criminal investigation into the offences I have reported. It should be easy to show that the written report which civil servants gave to the MOD Police was deliberately misleading. TI have previously issued statements about Al Yamamah and “Cash for Peerages”. This is a far more serious matter than either of those. (Al Yarmamah was only worth £2 billion a year. The UK is spending more than £19 billion a year on arms procurement. This figure excludes the additional spending due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

TI should also withdraw the “National Integrity Systems TI Country Study Report United Kingdom 2004” which contains factual errors and falsely claimed that there is no serious problem with fraud and corruption in the UK.

I recommend you read the information I handed out at the 2007 Transparency International AGM. To see this click here.

Alternatively, read these articles I posted on Indymedia:

This is intended to be a temporary addition to my website.