About a year ago, Tony Blair canceled a serious fraud investigation of a very large arms deal between BAE Systems^* and the House of Saud under threat of cancellation of the order, and now two NGOs have been given permission to investigate an investigation of this decision under the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention.

It’s pretty clear that bribery was involved, I believe that Prince Bandar got over a billion dollars in “consulting fees”, for example, and the House of Saud was quite clear that any investigation of kickbacks would result in the cancellation of the contract for multi-billion dollar purchase of Eurofighter Typhoons.

^*Full disclosure, I worked at a BAE Systems facility as a contractor from June 2005 (about, depends on when the sale went through) through Decmeber 2006 as a contractor. I had no involvement with this deal however.