A former British defense secretary claimed June 16 that Britain paid bribes to encourage Saudi Arabia to buy his country’s arms in the 1970s.”You either got the business and bribed or you didn’t bribe and didn’t get the business,” Lord Ian Gilmour told BBC television.The ex-minister’s comments come as Britain reportedly nears finalizing the sale of 40 billion pounds ($74 billion, 58.5 billion euros) worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, almost doubling the 50 billion pounds worth of trade already completed in recent years.”In those days you either went along with how the Saudis behaved or what they wanted or you let the United States and France have all the business,” said Gilmour, who was Britain’s defense secretary from January to March 1974 in the Conservative government of then-prime minister Edward Heath.”I think it would have been quite excessively puritanical for U.S. to say, ‘oh no, we won’t have anything to do with bribes or douceurs (sweeteners), we’ll let the other countries get the money’.”It’s not something you emblazon about or are particularly proud of. It just happens to be the terms of trade.”
It's stuff like this that can make a person go nuts thinking about all the backdoor deals that are made on the international stage that affect countless others. So basically, according to a former British defense secretary, everyone bribes everyone because that's how trade is done.
Wellington - New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark accused Japan on Monday of buying support for a return to commercial killing of whales with bribes of aid money it has spread around the poorest countries of the world.
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