Al Yamama arms deal

The Al Yamama arms deal is a very amusing phrase to say. The deal itself involves the sale of a number of state-of-the-art Eurofighter jets to Saudi Arabia by the United Kingdom.

The deal resulted in several high profile fraud investigations by the UK's serious fraud office, which were summarily quashed by the government on spurious "national security" grounds, over alleged bribes paid by British Aerospace to complete the deal. It is also suspected that Mark Thatcher, the comically bungling malefactor son of Margaret Thatcher, was involved in the deal and on the receiving end of dirty bungs.

Despite being well tooled-up with all this military kit, the Saudis appear to have taken a back seat in the subsequent War in Iraq. Or as the late Saddam Hussein put it "...they are defended by women in shorts (chortle-chortle)"

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice fined BAE Systems (postcursor of British Aerospace) USD $400M in a plea bargain for false accounting practices (but not bribery), related to the company's utilization of an U.S. banking institution to funnel payments to a Saudi prince.