Al Yamamah

Al Yamamah is Arabic for the dove and was all about buying the machineries of war. Start off with  a dodgy name and see it go off thereafter. There was not really a problem. Bribes were paid. That is how it works in so many places. Billions were involved of course but then it was a big contract.

But various self righteous twerps made a fuss about what was happening in far away countries. English law was changed in order to meddle in the affairs of friendly nations like Saudi Arabia. Bribes are just a cost of doing business in far off lands. So what? Of course we were all polite enough to assume that Brits were not part of the gravy train. Maggie fronted for England and £80 billion. Why shouldn't she come in for a few million? I am sure that little Mr Blair didn't see a problem. After all he did shut down the investigation. He came in for a lot of money too but that was after he left Downing Street. It has no connection whatsoever with what he did in office. Mordant comment comes from Lewis Page, late of Her Majesty's Royal Navy.

Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs page 117 by Lewis Page
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Only two nations ever bought the Tornado F3; Britain and Saudi Arabia. The most reasonable explanation for the Saudi F3 purchase would seem to lie in ongoing scandal regarding the lavish entertainment of Saudi princes. One notes that that the House of Saud also ordered American F-15s for actual use as opposed to the F3s which they seem to have bought for the accompanying free gifts [ See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Saudi_Air_Force - Editor ]. And it gets worse: the RAF could find no use at all for the Tornados that were forced on it. Of the 170 fighters procured by the UK, just 68 are in operational service as I write. The rest are mainly in mothballs. Some were lent to Italy for a while before being rejected by the disgusted Italians in favour of American planes.
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Money, money money. It's a rich man's world. Thus sang ABBA. They were right.

 

Al Yamamah ex Wiki
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Al Yamamah (The Dove) is the name of a series of a record arms sales by the United Kingdom to Saudi Arabia, which have been paid for by the delivery of up to 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day to the UK government. The prime contractor has been BAE Systems and its predecessor British Aerospace. The first sales occurred in September 1985 and the most recent contract for 72 Eurofighter Typhoon multirole fighters was signed in August 2006.

Mike Turner, the CEO of BAE Systems, said in August 2005 that BAE and its predecessor had earned £43 billion in twenty years from the contracts and that it could earn £40 billion more. It is Britain's largest ever export agreement, and employs some 5,000 people in Saudi Arabia.
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A useful sum of money.