'Deniable fiddle' A scandal that was 50 years in the making

The revelation that the Ministry of Defence paid millions of pounds to a firm that would later be accused of being a conduit for secret payments to high-ranking Saudi officials is the culmination of a scandal that has been half a century in the making.

- Rob Evans, David Pegg

The £8m paid from an MOD bank account between 2014 and 2017 was in connection with a defence deal, Sangcom, struck in the 1970s.

In Geneva in the mid-90s the British government's knowledge of payments being made to Saudi officials became clear, a court heard. It was there that a senior civil servant at the MoD is said to have informed two businessmen that the British government required their company to make payments to an offshore network.

Under the Sangcom deal, Britain provided military communications equipment and training to the Saudi Arabian national guard, or Sang. In 1994 a British firm, GPT Special Project Management, won a bid to take over as the main contractor on the deal.

One contract requirement had been described in tender documents only as Item 8 - "to be advised". In Geneva the man from the MoD is said to have explained to GPT executives what the mysterious Item 8 involved.

For every transaction under the contract, GPT would secretly pay an additional sum to offshore companies belonging to a fixer, Peter Austin.

These payments, the MOD man said, were essential. They also had to remain secret.

Another GPT director would later recall in court documents: "Commissions were then part and parcel of doing business in that part of the world." In 2020 investigators at the Serious Fraud Office brought corruption charges against two men over the payments. One of these men, Jeffrey Cook, was GPT's managing director from 2008 to 2013. The other, John Mason, was the accountant for Peter Austin's offshore companies, known as Simec. Austin was too ill to prosecute and died recently.

The two men were cleared of wrongdoing in connection with Sangcom when they were acquitted by a jury on Wednesday. They had presented an extraordinary defence: that the British state, in the form of the MoD, had for decades authorised the payments for which they were being tried.