The scale of British arms sales to Riyadh rises again amid secrecy over a meeting between BAE and trade minister Liam Fox after the Khashoggi killing. Documents show both the UK trade ministry and BAE sought to keep arming Saudi Arabia in the immediate wake of the dissident’s murder.
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.
Five highly repressive Gulf states – Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — have been able to invest at least £140bn in Britain. The figure is more than five times larger than Russian investments in the UK, which have, by contrast, received sustained criticism in the media and government.
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.
The UK government refuses to provide information to Parliament about the role of the military’s special forces in overseas wars, routinely claiming this is a ‘long-standing policy’ – but new research finds this was invented in the late 1980s to deepen the culture of secrecy in Whitehall.
Journalist Jamal Khashoggi criticised the Saudi regime for its ‘cruel war’ in Yemen and weeks later it murdered him, sparking an international outcry. But while his fiancée frantically searched for his body, Britain’s military quietly sold spare parts to Saudi Arabia’s air force, so it could keep bombing Yemen. And that arms deal is just one in a series of controversial weapons exports uncovered by Declassified UK.
Britain’s ambassador to Bolivia, Jeff Glekin, played a personal role in events leading up to the 2019 military-backed coup that deposed the country’s democratically elected president, Evo Morales — and strongly supported the new regime as it carried out two massacres of unarmed protesters, Declassified has found.
A new book, revealing abuses by the British army in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, illustrates how the Ministry of Defence and the military establishment try to censor, bully and threaten publishers and journalists, often successfully.
Britain wants to put satellites into space from home soil next year. At first, the futuristic ‘spaceports’ were aimed at commercial users. But now they could become embroiled in star wars, with the military telling Declassified it has met entrepreneurs from more than half of the UK’s launch pad companies.
The UK and its network of overseas territories are responsible for the loss of $160bn in public money around the world each year – more than one-third of the global total lost to tax abuse by companies and individuals. But the world just may be witnessing the beginning of the end of this ‘third age’ of illicit financial flows.