BAE - corrupt as fuck, at our expense
Mr Justice Bean says arms firm gave £8m to 'shady' middleman to secure Tanzania radar contract
Sir Richard Evans (pictured), then chairman of BAE, approved the use of a middleman in Tanzania in 2002, said Mr Justice Bean.

So what is Somerset MP Liam Fox, now Secretary of State for Defence intending to do to recover the lost billions ?
After all BAE is now shedding jobs like a tree sheds its leaves in autumn, so the lost billions of pounds would be handy for either the NHS, education or housing.
While guilty, BAE get off with paying peanuts.
This being only one of the corrupt deals they've undertaken.
A judge has declared he was "astonished" at claims that BAE Systems, Britain's biggest arms firm, had not acted corruptly when its executives made illicit payments to land an export contract.
Mr Justice Bean said it was "naive in the extreme" to believe that a "shady" middleman who handed out the covert payments was simply a well-paid lobbyist.
The judge concluded that BAE had concealed the payments so that the middleman had free rein to give them "to such people as he thought fit" to secure the contract for the company. BAE did not want to know the details, he added.
His verdict at Southwark crown court today brings to an end long-running attempts to prosecute BAE over bribery allegations in a number of countries. One investigation, into a Saudi arms deal, was terminated by Tony Blair's government.
Today's prosecution centred on a relatively small accounting offence admitted by BAE in relation to one contract in one country – a £28m radar deal in Tanzania in 2002.
Corruption allegations have swirled around the overpriced radar deal since it was signed in 2001, with former Labour minister Clare Short saying: "It was always obvious that this useless project was corrupt."
Bean pointed out that no individual was prosecuted, even though the payments were deliberately hidden by BAE's executives and the use of the middleman was "personally approved" by its then chairman, Sir Richard Evans.
BAE was brought to court for the single offence after agreeing a plea bargain with the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to settle years of investigations. The company did so provided that it did not have to admit corruption.
The court heard how BAE had hired the Tanzanian middleman, Sailesh Vithlani, to secure the radar contract and gave him $12.4m (£8m) over five years – a third of the contract's value.
BAE and the SFO argued in court that Vithlani was being paid to lobby for the contract. But Bean said it was inexplicable that Vithlani received more than $12m and that most of this was channelled via two offshore companies, one in the British Virgin Islands and the other in Panama.
The judge accepted there was no surviving evidence to prove what Vithlani did with the money. "I also accept that there is no evidence that BAE was party to an agreement to corrupt. They did not wish to be and did not need to be," he said. The fact that the money had been paid through the two offshore companies placed BAE "at two or three removes from any shady activity by Mr Vithlani".
He said he could not accept the arguments of BAE and SFO that the former was concealing "merely a series of payments to an expensive lobbyist".
He had raised the possibility of calling witnesses to testify "if it really is the case that legitimate lobbyists could be paid 30% of the value of a $40m contract simply as recompense for their time and trouble".
The judge fined BAE £500,000 for concealing the payments to Vithlani "from the auditors and ultimately the public". He added that there was "moral pressure" on him to keep the fine low, as BAE had agreed in the plea bargain to pay £30m in corporate reparations and fines.
The arms company had said that any fine would be subtracted from that total, with the "balance paid as an ex gratia payment for the benefit of the people of Tanzania".
A sum of £29.5m was now due to be paid to the Tanzanian people – "the victims of this way of obtaining business", said the judge.
BAE will pay £225,000 for the SFO's legal costs in bringing the prosecution, although the financially-strapped agency had asked for £750,000.
Nicholas Hildyard of anti-corruption campaign the Corner House said: "BAE has been convicted of an accounting misdemeanour that hid a major crime: concealing improper payments. The company will never be able to deny this in future."
Kaye Stearman of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade said: "Today's sentencing is an indictment of BAE's culpability. Whatever the level of the fine, the judge's remarks are damning."
In the same deal to settle the corruption investigations in February, the US government compelled BAE to pay $400m (£260m) in penalties.