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highlights
April 2008:
The Serious Fraud Office in the UK was given leave to
appeal
against a High Court
judgment
that it "acted unlawfully" when it halted the investigation into BAE
Systems and the Al Yamamah arms deal. Earlier,
the OECD carried out a further
examination of the UK's implementation of the OECD Anti-bribery
Convention, following its failure to enact adequate foreign bribery
legislation, bring prosecutions, or effectively engage the liability of
companies for foreign bribery offences.
March 2008:
The UK Government published its
Draft
Constitutional Renewal Bill, which contained proposals to increase the
powers of the Attorney General to stop criminal investigations on 'national security' grounds. The Swiss Bank, Julius Baer,
dropped
its lawsuit against Wikileaks, after a judge reversed his order to disable
the site for posting confidential bank documents.
February 2008: Wikileaks,
which publishes 'anonymous, untraceable and uncensorable' documents, was
taken
offline after a fire and a restraining order. The High Court
(London) heard
the
Judicial Review
brought by The Corner House and Campaign Against Arms
Trade (CAAT) contesting the legality of the decision to terminate the investigation into alleged bribery by BAE
Systems and its arms deal with Saudi Arabia.
January 2008:
The head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in Nigeria,
Nuhu Ribadu, agreed to
stand down for a year, following pressure from
the President to attend a training course. Earlier,
Human
Rights Watch described efforts to remove Ribadu as a "thinly veiled
attempt to gut the only law enforcement agency that has tried to hold
prominent ruling party politicians to account for their many crimes".
December 2007:
Siemens allegedly made
improper payments to senior officials of the Association of
Independent Employees, an employer-friendly competitor to the main
trade union at the company IG Metall. Earlier in the month
Nigeria debarred
Siemens for corruption.
November 2007:
Siemens wrote a
letter of apology to Nigeria's Prime Minister for the bribery scandal
involving the payment of bribes totalling Euro 10 million. The High Court
in the UK
granted permission to the Corner House and the Campaign Against Arms
Trade to challenge the decision to halt the bribery investigation
involving BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia. Earlier, Siemens disclosed that it
had uncovered 'questionable payments' of
$US 1.9 billion.
October 2007:
Siemens was fined
Euro 210 million by the Munich District Court for paying bribes
totalling $17.5 million in Nigeria, Russia and Libya.
September 2007:
Saudi Arabia ordered
72 Eurofighters from the UK at a cost of US$8.6 billion. Transparency
International interviewed Annie Geron, General Secretary of the Public
Services Trade Union PSLINK, on
blowing the whistle in the Philippines.
August 2007:
Wikileaks, an 'uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document
leaking and analysis', published the Kroll Report - a secret report written
in 2004 that unveils a web of shell companies, trusts and frontmen
allegedly
used by former Kenyan president Moi and his associates to launder billions of US
dollars.
July 2007:
Transparency International's latest
progress
report on the implementation of the OECD Anti-bribery Convention
found that over half the major exporting countries lack the political will
to prosecute foreign bribery. On the BAE
case, the
USA's Department of Justice requested the UK to hand
over all the evidence of secret payments made to members of the Saudi royal
family.
June 2007:
The OECD announced that
South Africa was to become the 37th signatory and first African
country to join the OECD's Anti-Bribery Convention. On BAE, the UK current affairs television programme,
Panorama, reported that hundreds
of millions of pounds in secret payments had been passed from BAE Systems
to a Saudi Prince, with the authorisation of the UK's Ministry of
Defence.
May 2007:
The
Swiss federal prosecutor's office announced its legal
investigation into allegations of corruption surrounding BAE
Systems. Earlier in the month, a
probe by an external law firm into Siemens revealed a "general
practice" of paying bribes across the company.
April 2007:
Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) and The Corner House, lodged the full
grounds for their
judicial review
of the UK Government's
decision to terminate an investigation into alleged corruption by BAE
Systems over its Al Yamamah arms contract with Saudi Arabia. Also in
April, the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) signed an
agreement to work jointly on corruption.
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