LETTER: Arms deal warnings unheeded

The Pietermaritzburg high court hopefully put an end to former president Jacob Zuma’s 20 years of “Stalingrad” antics regarding the arms deal scandal and French government bribery payments on September 11. As I have written previously, Zuma and the French were actually just “small fish” in the arms deal scandal. (“GNU should demand reparations for arms deal”, September 3).

I informed the British government’s export credits guarantee department in 1999 that serious evidence of BAE/Saab corruption had been forwarded to judge Willem Heath for his assessment, pending which it would be fraudulent for the department to proceed with the proposed Barclays Bank funding of the acquisitions.

Subsequently, and confirming bribery payments, the British Serious Fraud Office and the Scorpions compiled 160 pages of affidavits detailing how and why BAE paid bribes of £115m (R2.7bn equivalent at present exchange rates) to secure the fighter aircraft sales, which the SA Air Force had rejected as unsuited to SA requirements and too expensive as early as 1997.

In 2003, on receipt of the 20-year Barclays Bank loan agreement from a source in London, I filed that 20-year loan agreement signed by [then] finance minister Trevor Manuel in the Cape Town high court, its role in the arms deal being “affordability” and “funding”. The minister’s legal counsel confirmed in court that the documents were authentic. He also described them and their covenant, representation and default clauses as “potentially catastrophic for SA” and thus extremely sensitive.

As if in defiance of the bribery warnings, those Barclays Bank loan agreements were also signed by the UK export credits guarantee department’s director on behalf of Her Britannic Majesty’s government as secretary of state. The export credits guarantee department was notorious for casting a blind eye to bribery payments by British arms companies, and was subsequently replaced by UK Finance.

Negates good

Successive Swedish governments were equally complicit. In November 1999 Swedish prime minister Gören Perssen brought a 700-strong “trade delegation” to SA to lobby on behalf of Saab. In 2010 Swedish TV4 exposed the role back in 1998 of Stefan Lövren (who became prime minister from 2014 until 2021) in transferring bribes to the ANC ahead of the 1999 election. The Swedish newspaper Expressen in 2015 revealed that Saab made provision for bribery payments of 7.25% of the contracts.

When in my presence one of the Expressen journalists showed the documents to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he declared: “This negates all the good that Sweden did in supporting the struggle against apartheid. I am totally distressed given what the money spent on those planes could have done in SA, and that the British and Swedish governments were so involved in the cover-up.”

After the Seriti commission debacle that so blatantly claimed it had found no evidence of arms deal corruption, back in 2017 the Quaker Peace Centre in Cape Town filed a summons against Barclays Bank. Per Lord Denning’s famous legal maxim “fraud unravels everything and that the fraudster should not be allowed to profit financially from his fraud”, can the National Prosecuting Authority and the judicial system at last set a court date for the Quaker Peace Centre case against Barclays Bank, which, in defiance of those warnings 24 years ago, so fraudulently financed the purchase of the BAE/Saab Hawk and Gripen warplanes?

Terry Crawford-Browne
Via email

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