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UK groups question BAE termination of ECGD insurance
BAE Systems, the UK's largest arms company, has cancelled all its public
insurance with ECGD for its controversial arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
The news is very welcome from a human rights persepctive - for the first time in over 20 years, the UK government is no longer underwriting arms deals with Saudi Arabia, a government that has a very poor human rights record.
But, from an anti-corruption perspective, the timing of the cancellation is suspicious and came to light only as a result of NGO correspondence and questions subsequently asked in the UK Parliament (House of Commons) by Member of Parliament Vince Cable. The cancellation came just weeks before the publication of a damning report from the Anti-Bribery Working Group of the Organisation on Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in October 2008 which was report was highly critical of ECGD's continuing support for BAE's Saudi Arabian arms contracts. The OECD queried why ECGD had not acted on evidence that BAE had allegedly made bribery-related fraudulent misrepresentations when it requested insurance cover from ECGD. The Serious Fraud Office had handed this information over to ECGD as part of its corruption investigation into BAE's contracts with Saudi Arabia.
The Corner House and Campaign Against Arms Trade have written to the OECD's Working group on Bribery and the OECD's Export Credit Group to urge that they dispel any suspicion that BAE colluded with the UK government to get the ECGD off the hook -- if ECGD is no longer providing any cover, there is no longer any legal reason as to why it should act on the alleged fraud.
See the links to letters and correspondence with ECGD below:
Letter to OECD Working Group on Bribery
Letter to OECD Export Credit Working Group
NGO correspondence with ECGD
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