Two men acquitted of bribing Saudis in huge British defence deal

Two men have been acquitted of paying bribes totalling millions of pounds to high-ranking Saudis after they argued that they had been unfairly prosecuted.

Jeffrey Cook and John Mason had been accused of bribing a Saudi prince and his associates to secure and maintain a huge defence deal for a British company. But on Wednesday, a jury in London acquitted them after lawyers argued the payments had been authorised by the British and Saudi governments.

Tom Allen, the KC representing Cook, had told jurors at Southwark crown court that a wide array of British politicians, officials and military figures had long known about, and approved, the payments to the Saudis.

His client, he said, had been “hung out to dry”, as the UK Ministry of Defence had in effect authorised the exact type of payments that the two men were being prosecuted for.

The acquittal is a defeat for the Serious Fraud Office, which brought a prosecution against the two men, after an investigation that lasted nearly a decade.

In court, the SFO had alleged Cook and Mason had been at “the very heart of the operation” to pay £9.7m to a group of leading Saudis between 2007 and 2010. It said the payments had been made to Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, a son of the late King Abdullah, and his associates to ensure that a British firm, GPT Special Project Management, continued to receive lucrative contracts from a Saudi military unit.

The Saudi national guard, for which the British government installed and maintained communications equipment. Photograph: Fahad Shadeed/Reuters
Miteb, who was once seen as a contender for the throne, had been appointed to lead the unit, the Saudi Arabian national guard (Sang), by his father.

The payments related to a decades-long deal worth at least £1.6bn, under which the British government installed and maintained communications equipment for the unit. In turn, the British government paid GPT to be the key contractor to deliver the deal.

Cook, 67, was GPT’s managing director, while Mason, 81, partly owned a firm that directed the payments to the Saudis via offshore bank accounts.

In their successful defence, Cook and Mason had accepted that they were involved in making the payments between 2007 and 2010. However, they argued that they should be acquitted on the grounds that for years the British government had approved and facilitated the payments to members of the Saudi royal family and other senior Saudis in military contracts.

This was done, they said, to ensure that British firms won the contracts from the Saudis instead of companies from rival countries such as France and the US.

Allen, the KC representing Cook, said the payments were “known and authorised” by the highest levels of the British and Saudi governments, “and by that I mean senior civil servants in the MoD and Whitehall, diplomatic figures, political figures, ministers, and secretaries of state”.

A first trial had been halted by Mr Justice Bryan in July 2022 after it emerged that the MoD had failed to hand over important evidence to the lawyers involved in the case.

Cook was convicted of a different offence, misconduct in public office, as he received kickbacks of £45,000 and two cars – a Nissan Micra and a Honda Civic – between 2004 and 2008 for work relating to GPT. This was unrelated to the Saudi deal. He was at that time working for the MoD and had yet to join GPT. He will be sentenced at a later date.

The SFO began its investigation after it received a cache of evidence from a whistleblower. Ian Foxley, a senior GPT executive, claimed to have discovered that substantial payments were being paid to offshore accounts without any justification.

The SFO’s prosecution was marked by delay and protracted legal arguments. Before it could come to court, it needed the consent of the attorney general and was three years before Geoffrey Cox, the then attorney general, agreed in 2019 to the prosecution.

Article Credit: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/06/two-men-acquitted-of-bribing-saudis-in-huge-british-defence-deal