BBC NEWS | Business | Saudi prince ‘received arms cash’<\/a>: “A Saudi prince who negotiated a \u00a340bn arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia received secret payments for over a decade, a BBC probe has found.<\/p>\nThe UK’s biggest arms dealer, BAE Systems, paid hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.<\/p>\n
The payments were made with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence.<\/p>\n
Prince Bandar would not comment on the investigation and BAE Systems said it acted lawfully at all times.<\/p>\n
The MoD said information about the Al Yamamah deal was confidential.<\/p>\n
Sir Raymond Lygo, a former chief executive of BAE, told the BBC’s World Business Report that there had been ‘nothing untoward’ about the arms deal.<\/p>\n
‘I was the one who won the contract,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about him (the prince) at all. I would have remembered that name.’<\/p>\n
When asked about the secret payments, Sir Lygo said that it was not going on when the deal was signed.<\/p>\n
‘I would have known if it was going on at the time. I was not aware of it, so as far as I am concerned it was not occuring.<\/p>\n
‘Yes, we paid agents. Nothing illegal about that. It was absolutely in accordance with the law at the time… there was nothing untoward about the deal whatsoever.”<\/p>\n
Private plane<\/b><\/p>\n
The investigation found that up to \u00a3120m a year was sent by BAE Systems from the UK into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington.<\/p>\n
…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u00a3120m\/year. At current exchange rates, that’s about $240 million.<\/p>\n
High priced agent. He’s getting more a year than A-Rod, whose agent gets even less than that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It should be noted that he is so close to the Bush family that he’s called “Bandar Bush”. BBC NEWS | Business | Saudi prince ‘received arms cash’: “A Saudi prince who negotiated a \u00a340bn arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia received secret payments for over a decade, a BBC probe has found. The …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1006,1215],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-military","category-the-bush-crime-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200038"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200038\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}