Ce que BAE-Yamamah (-MoD) nous révèle

Le dernier épisode ou dernier rebondissement du scandale BAE-Yamamah éclaire peu à peu les dégâts causés par cette affaire, et cela dans un processus qui remonte à son origine (1985) et donne toute son ampleur historique à la chose. Deux articles, aujourd’hui dans le Guardian nous donnent la clef de ce nouveau constat.

Le premier décrit la bataille du ministère de la défense (MoD) pour empêcher une quelconque réouverture de l’enquête ou une enquête nouvelle sur la question. Le MoD écarte absolument toute indication sur la réalité et l’actualité des paiements faits à Prince Bandar, par lui-même, — avec cette explication étrange, ou lumineuse, et en forme de lapalissade révélatrice, du ministre lui-même : «Je ne vais pas discuter de ces contrats confidentiels pour la raison précise que cela produirait des conséquences que nous ne voulons pas voir se produire.»

«Des Browne, the defence secretary, yesterday refused point-blank to say whether his department's £1bn backdoor payments to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia for arms deals were still continuing. Visibly uneasy and irritated at a lunch with defence journalists, he claimed “national security” was the reason for his silence.

»He also refused to say whether he or his predecessors were aware of the payments allegedly processed by MoD officials and wired to an American bank via the arms firm BAE as an integral part of Britain's biggest arms deal. “I am not going to discuss the detail of these confidential contracts for the very reason it would generate the consequences we do not want to generate,” he said.

»The Liberal Democrats' leader, Menzies Campbell, last night criticised Mr Browne's silence. “We need a full investigation to determine whether the Ministry of Defence has been directly involved in processing payments to Prince Bandar. The department's failure to clarify this issue is unacceptable. We need to know whether any payments took place after 2002 and whether they breached anti-corruption legislation. If it appears the law has been broken then it would be a matter for the police.”

If the funds continued past 2002, when Britain outlawed payments by firms to overseas public officials to gain contracts, they might have been contrary to the Blair government's own much-trumpeted legislation. Jeremy Carver, a lawyer and board member of Transparency International, told BBC Panorama this week: “Those payments, on the face of it, are straightforward bribes as defined by the OECD anti-bribery convention ... it's quite plain that he meets the test of who is a foreign official for the purpose of the OECD convention.”»

Le second article est un commentaire de Simon Jenkins sur l’affaire. Dans ce cas également, Jenkins se concentre sur le rôle du MoD comme pourvoyeur et exécutant de la corruption.

«Remember, any government scandal always turns out worse than first it seems. Remember too that if it involves an assertion by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, race to the kitchen and count your spoons.

»I thought that little more could be squeezed from the Guardian's BAE/Saudi corruption story until the BBC's revelation on Monday [Panorama] that long-denied bribes had actually been countersigned by the Ministry of Defence. Those who jeer at the ethical standards of foreign governments should understand that these officials, were they in Washington, would now be in handcuffs.

(…)

»Panorama revealed that the Ministry of Defence specifically processed, and may still be processing, quarterly invoices for £30m to Bandar. It so happens that the head of the relevant MoD sales unit, Alan Garwood, is a former BAE executive. He reports to Lord Drayson, the arms sales minister, who gave Labour £500,000 within weeks of being made a life peer in 2004 and described himself as “entrepreneur-in-residence” at the Said Business School in Oxford. Wafic Said was Bandar's aide in negotiating al-Yamamah and is assumed to figure among its many beneficiaries. That Blair should have made Drayson political overseer of the Bandar payments cannot be a coincidence.

»As the onion skins peel back, al-Yamamah emerges as not a defence contract at all but a vehicle for financial “skimming” by rich Saudis (and Britons such as Mark Thatcher). While British governments could argue that before the 1998 convention such payments were legal, that has not been so since and they were specifically outlawed in 2001. Whitehall has been complicit in a colossal, secret and illegal act of bribery to win a grossly inflated contract. That is why Goldsmith had to suppress the SFO inquiry and why BAE dare not let Lord Woolf near the stinking trough. And Blair has the gall to call the press cynical.»

Ce qui est ainsi mis en lumière est le rôle du MoD dans cette affaire. Le ministère joue, depuis 1985, le rôle de bras armé de BAE, agissant comme une sorte d’intermédiaire garantissant le flux d’argent vers tous ceux qui sont impliqués, une sorte de “factoring” chargé de la bonne exécution des factures. Pour cela, comme le rappelle Jenkins, des hommes directement ou indirectement connectés à BAE sont installés dans la place, au MoD même.

Pour nous, cela enrichit le tableau de l’affaire qui fait de ce consortium BAE quelque chose d’archétypique de la globalisation. On comprend que l’activité financière essentielle de la globalisation est la corruption des espaces nationaux qui permet de verrouiller les monopoles hors de toute considération nationale (c’est-à-dire les intérêts nationaux). Yamamah ne profite ni au Royaume-Uni ni à la puissance publique (MoD) ; Yamamah utilise le Royaume-Uni et la puissance publique au profit d’un establishment transnational qui va des Thatcher (Margaret et son fils Mark) à Prince Bandar, en passant par diverses célébrités régulièrement célébrées pour leurs vertus modernistes et libérales. L’édifice a été parfaitement achevé par l’“ère Blair”, totalement connectée à cette structure de corruption, achevant le phénomène par l’infection du comportement, — de la corruption vénale à la corruption psychologique. Le scandale BAE-Yamamah, qu’il faudra désormais désigner comme le “scandale BAE-Yamamah-MoD”, est un modèle du genre, l’archétype de tous les archétypes, — ou, disons, “le père de tous les archétypes”.

Mis en ligne le 13 juin 2007 à 05H54