| You have probably never heard of Jeffrey Cook and John Mason. Cook, 67, was the managing director of a company called GPT Special Project Management Ltd, which was paid by the British government to be a key contractor to deliver a £1.6bn defence deal called Sangcom in which the UK installed and maintained communications gear for the Saudi national guard. Mason, 81, was an accountant and the part-owner of a firm that received payments totalling £9.7m from GPT and directed them to a group of leading Saudi officials between 2007 and 2010. After an investigation lasting nearly a decade, the Serious Fraud Office prosecuted the two men on the basis that those payments were corrupt. In 2022, their trial was halted after the MoD initially failed to hand over crucial evidence – and witnesses who worked there were accused of “collective amnesia”. The prosecution of Cook and Mason might have remained obscure if it weren’t for the basis of their successful defence: not that the payments weren’t made, but that they were made with the full knowledge of officials at the MoD. Now that the trial is over, the implications of that defence can be revealed in full. Here’s a summary of the key stories. What is the story about? In essence, Cook and Mason’s lawyers told the trial that they were being scapegoated: Tom Allen, Cook’s KC, told jurors that the exact type of payments made had been effectively authorised by the MoD, which had also authorised similar payments, and that his client had been “hung out to dry”. In the course of their trial, as this piece explains, documents emerged that revealed the MoD paid at least £8m under a secret contract from 2014, codenamed Project Arrow, to a Saudi company, called ABTSS. GPT had made payments through third parties to ABTSS – and the Saudi firm was later alleged to have been used as a way to route payments to senior Saudi officials. Those payments came as the Sangcom deal for the supply of military communications equipment was said to be in danger of collapsing, and the MoD sought to maintain it. The Project Arrow contract continued until at least 2017. Meanwhile, the Serious Fraud Office suspected that a Saudi prince, Miteb bin Abdullah, was the beneficiary of the GPT payments. It was Miteb (above) who was said to have asked for the Project Arrow contract to be signed. Philip Hammond, then the defence secretary, was briefed shortly before a meeting with Miteb while the MoD was weighing up the decision. An official told colleagues that Hammond “had read carefully the brief and is prepared for the Miteb meeting”, although exactly what the minister was told is unknown. Hammond has been approached for comment. Emails revealed during the trial show that a senior MoD official told colleagues that Miteb’s request would be “difficult/impossible to turn down”, and that “conversely it is a real opportunity to build influence and reputation with the one person we, HMG, really want to reach”. But others in the MoD warned that great care would have to be taken “to ensure that there can be no accusation, either real or perceived, of any impropriety”. And at the trial, an MoD witness denied that Project Arrow had been set up to enable payments to members of the national guard, and said he would have been “extremely alarmed” had such a notion been suggested. Who is Miteb? Miteb’s father, Abdullah, was the king of Saudi Arabia from 2005 until he died in 2015. Miteb was once considered a possible successor, and led the Saudi national guard, the country’s elite security force. That role appears to have been lucrative, and Miteb was believed to have taken a personal cut over many years from contracts to supply equipment to the guards. The Sangcom deal was one such case. For all his wealth and seniority, though, he was not immune to the risks of Saudi royal politics. In 2017, he was arrested by Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto Saudi ruler, as part of an anti-corruption drive that was suspected to be a way of taking down political rivals. It is not known precisely what he was accused of, but he was eventually freed after he reportedly admitted corruption and paid $1bn. His whereabouts are now unknown. For more on Miteb, see this short profile. What is the history of British deal-making in Saudi Arabia? Among the many memorable details in this investigation is the description used by a Foreign Office official in the 1960s for the mechanism of British deal-making in Saudi Arabia: a “deniable fiddle”. Middlemen were a crucial means of distancing the British source of the payments from the Saudis who would ultimately receive them. There is no denial that payments to officials were an accepted part of arms deals between the UK and Saudi Arabia until the mid-90s: indeed, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) described the British government’s attitude towards such payments as “permissive”. This backgrounder explains that history in detail. That custom changed, particularly as new legal frameworks were introduced more recently. But the evidence heard at the trial suggests that there are now major questions over whether a similar arrangement was in place as recently as seven years ago. What was GPT’s role in all this? In 2010, Ian Foxley, a senior financial executive at GPT, discovered payments marked as “bought-in services”. He then turned whistleblower, and gave his evidence to the SFO. The investigation that followed ultimately led to Miteb. In the 1990s, the MoD entered a contract with GPT to facilitate the provision of equipment and training to the Saudi national guard. The trial heard that a senior government official told a GPT executive that alongside the legitimate transactions an additional payment would be made to a fixer’s offshore company, Simec – and that the payments had to be kept secret. The court heard that a British civil servant and a Saudi official were both said to have signed a letter that “confirmed that the payments to Simec were necessary to enable the contract between the MoD and the [national guard] to run smoothly”. That letter was supposedly locked in an MoD safe. The MoD says it has never been able to find such a letter. Why does all of this matter? The sheer complexity of this saga might be seen as part of the point: the layers between the British government and Saudi officials are alleged to have been deliberately introduced to maintain as much distance as possible between the sources of the various payments and their ultimate destinations. Today, British military deals with Saudi Arabia, traditionally the dominant segment of the UK’s arms export trade, remain controversial, not least because of how weapons might be used. The Campaign Against the Arms Trade says that UK-made weapons have been extensively used as part of Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign in Yemen, which has left thousands of civilians dead. It estimated that between 2015 and 2023, some £8.2bn worth of arms were licensed to be sold. Now, campaigners are calling for a judge-led inquiry of the MoD’s role in payments to the Saudis given the new evidence brought to light. Dr Susan Hawley, the director of Spotlight on Corruption, said: “The MoD’s apparent decision to contract directly with a Saudi company at the heart of the SFO’s criminal investigation, at the direct request of the Saudi official implicated in the allegations, is deeply shocking.” | 