Two UK men found not guilty over bribes for Saudi military deal

The former managing director of an Airbus subsidiary was acquitted in a London court on Wednesday of bribing senior Saudi Arabian officials, after a trial in which the British government was accused of involvement in the alleged corruption.

Jeffrey Cook, who ran GPT Special Project Management, had been charged with overseeing corrupt payments to middlemen to obtain lucrative deals with the Saudi Arabian National Guard.

Cook, 67, and John Mason, 81, who prosecutors said was the accountant and part-owner of the business of the middlemen, stood trial at Southwark Crown Court.

Cook and Mason pleaded not guilty to paying bribes to top Saudi officials including Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, son of the late King Abdullah, between 2007 and 2012.

They were cleared by a jury after more than 30 hours of deliberation over the case, which focused on GPT, a now-defunct subsidiary of Airbus. Its sole business was to provide communications systems to the Saudi Arabian National Guard under a contract with Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD).

Prosecutors had alleged Cook and Mason were at the heart of "deep corruption" as part of which bribes of more than 9.7 million pounds ($12.3 million) were paid to Saudi officials and intermediaries between 2007 and 2010.

Cook and Mason, however, said the British government approved millions of pounds of payments because they were in the country's financial and strategic interests.

Tom Allen, representing Cook, said senior British officials, politicians and diplomats knew and consented to payments totalling nearly 60 million pounds from 1978 onwards.

Cook was also charged with one count of misconduct in public office between 2006 and 2007, when he worked for the MoD. He was found guilty of that charge and will be sentenced on Apr. 12.

His lawyers declined to comment. Mason's lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A British government spokesperson said: "We have a zero-tolerance approach to misconduct in public office and therefore welcome this conviction."

The trial, which began in November, was the second time Cook and Mason had faced the charges after their first trial collapsed in 2022, in part due to prosecution failures to disclose documents about other UK-Saudi defence projects.

Their lawyers tried to have the case thrown out last year, saying Britain had signed off similar corrupt payments in relation to those other projects over decades.

Cook's lawyer Allen argued in court filings that GPT's alleged corruption was "a very small part of a much larger unacknowledged picture" and was accepted "in order to maintain (Britain's) commercial, diplomatic, and security relationship with Saudi Arabia, the UK's key partner in the Middle East".

GPT had previously pleaded guilty to corruption and in 2021 was ordered to pay more than 30 million pounds.

An Airbus spokesperson declined to comment on Cook and Mason's cases.

"It is absolutely essential that there is now a full judge-led inquiry into the government and MoD's role in the corruption allegations heard in court," said campaign group Spotlight on Corruption's executive director Susan Hawley in a statement.