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Al-Yamamah Arms Agreement

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should consult his former colleague, John McGregor, who has exceptionally strong views about the abuse of taxpayers’ money in that context. At the heart of the controversy is the way in which that complex contract led to corruption. Nobody has ever denied that large commission payments and corruption were involved in this case. Prince Bandar, who was the Saudi ambassador to the United States, fully acknowledged that over three decades roughly £50 million of the £40 billion spent by the Saudis was creamed off in the form of commissions to the royal family, adding, ““So what?”” We know—from people who have left the service of BAE Systems and sources such as Charles Freeman, who was the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and the CIA, whose material has been published—the way in which the slush funds operated. It is a long story, so I shall give the House a flavour of what happened through one or two vignettes. For example, in 1995, Prince Turki bin Nasr, who was head of the air force and one of the main recipients of commissions, went on a shopping trip. At some point, he and his party must have run out of plastic bags, because they ordered a cargo plane to take the shopping back to Saudi Arabia. They then billed BAE Systems for £165,000. In 2000, the same Minister paid a visit to the then Secretary of State for Defence, the right hon. Member for Ashfield (Mr. Hoon), and was sufficiently stressed by the experience to need to clock into a health clinic for a couple of days, for which he billed BAE Systems £30,327. We know from the same sources that that Minister was paid roughly £3 million a year. His monthly credit card bill of £100,000 was routinely accepted. All that was justified—it has just been justified again by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and the right hon. Member for Warley (Mr. Spellar), a former Defence Minister—in the interest of jobs. As a constituency MP who frequently defends jobs in his constituency, I think that it is proper and appropriate for Members to advance that argument, but the issue is whether those jobs were justified by the way in which this matter proceeded. As I pointed out to the right hon. Member for Warley, those jobs were heavily subsidised and underwritten by the taxpayer, underpinned by corruption and eventually made us subject to blackmail. However, I accept that jobs were created by the project, and my final points centre on that issue. Employment was of course created in that industry and that company. The question is whether the price was worth paying and we need also to ask what that price was.