Sir Alan Duncan, an oil salesman turned British foreign minister, has been approved by the UK government to take up a role at Vitol, the world’s largest petroleum trader. Declassified reveals the potential conflict of interests at the heart of the appointment.
As protests in Colombia are met with deadly violence, Declassified reveals the UK’s National Crime Agency trained the Colombian police in a multimillion-pound five-year programme that is shrouded in secrecy.
The recently published diaries of former foreign minister Sir Alan Duncan provide an unprecedented window into the influence the Israeli government and affiliated pro-Israel lobby groups have over the UK Foreign Office.
The new head of MI6 says his agency will monitor other countries’ climate commitments, but the UK’s intelligence agencies are refusing to provide any information on their own environmental footprint.
While the UK government has been backing Israel’s intense bombing campaign in Gaza, Declassified can reveal that a third of cabinet ministers and the foreign minister responsible for the Middle East, have been courted by the Israeli government or pro-Israel lobby groups.
British aid projects supporting Palestinian security forces appear to be as much about helping to stop threats to Israel, the occupying power, as they are about enhancing Palestinian state-building.
Declassified UK obtains first evidence of the environmental footprint of Britain’s surveillance agency, GCHQ, which shows its staff are flying nearly three times more than the average Briton annually, raising questions about the scale of its global base network, which has never been officially acknowledged.
The terrible scenes of young people being gunned down by Burma’s military junta should make British diplomats think hard about why their policy of aiding and trading with the regime went so wrong.
The British government sought, in 2000, to integrate Putin’s Russia into the Western-ruled economic system, despite its brutal military campaign in Chechnya, documents obtained by Declassified show.