Islamic State and al-Qaida threat is intense in Africa, with growing risks in Syria, UN experts say
Their report to the U.N. Security Council circulated Wednesday said West Africa 's al-Qaida-linked Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin group, known as JNIM, and East Africa 's al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab have continued to increase the territory under their control.
The experts monitoring sanctions against the two groups said 'the organization's pivot towards parts of Africa continued" partly because of Islamic State losses in the Middle East due to counterterrorism pressures. There are also 'increasing concerns about foreign terrorist fighters returning to Central Asia and Afghanistan, aiming to undermine regional security,' they said.
The Islamic State also continues to represent 'the most significant threat' to Europe and the Americas, the experts said, often by individuals radicalized via social media and encrypted messaging platforms by its Afghanistan-based Khorasan group.
In the United States, the experts said several alleged terrorist attack plots were 'largely motivated by the Gaza and Israel conflict,' or by individuals radicalized by IS, also known as ISIL.
They pointed to an American who pledged support to IS and drove into a crowd in New Orleans on Jan. 1, killing 14 people in the deadliest attack by al-Qaida or the Islamic State in the U.S. since 2016. In addition, they said, 'Authorities disrupted attacks, including an ISIL-inspired plot to conduct a mass shooting at a military base in Michigan,' and the IS Khorasan affiliate issued warnings of plots targeting Americans.
In Africa's Sahel region, the experts said, JNIM expanded its area of operations, operating 'with relative freedom' in northern Mali and most of Burkina Faso. There was also a resurgence of activity by the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, 'particularly along the Niger and Nigeria border, where the group was seeking to entrench itself.'
'JNIM reached a new level of operational capability to conduct complex attacks with drones, improvised explosive devices and large numbers of fighters against well-defended barracks,' the experts said.
In East Africa, they said, 'al-Shabab maintained its resilience, intensifying operations in southern and central Somalia' and continuing its ties with Yemen's Houthi rebels. The two groups have reportedly exchanged weapons and the Houthis have trained al-Shabab fighters, they said.
Syria, the experts said, remains 'in a volatile and precarious phase,' six months after the ouster of President Bashar Assad, with unnamed countries warning of growing risks posed by both IS and al-Qaida.
'Member states estimated that more than 5,000 foreign terrorist fighters were involved in the military operation in which Damascus was taken on Dec. 8,' the experts' 27-page report said.
Syria's new interim President Ahmad Al-Sharaa led the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, once an al-Qaida affiliate that later split from it. He has promised that the country will transition to a system that includes Syria's mosaic of religious and ethnic groups under fair elections, but skeptics question whether that will actually happen.
The experts expressed concern at the Syrian military's announcement of several senior appointments including 'prominent Syrian armed faction leaders' and six positions for foreigners — three with the rank of brigadier general and three with the rank of colonel.
'The ideological affiliation of many of these individuals was unknown, although several were likely to hold violent extremist views and external ambitions," the report said.
As for financing, the experts said the HTS takeover in Syria was considered to pose financial problems for the Islamic State and likely to lead to a decline in its revenues.
Salaries for Islamic State fighters were reduced to $50-$70 per month and $35 per family, 'lower than ever, and not paid regularly, suggesting financial difficulties,' said the experts, who did not give previous salaries or family payments.
They said both al-Qaida and the Islamic State vary methods to obtain money according to locations and their ability to exploit resources, tax local communities, kidnap for ransom and exploit businesses.
While the extremist groups predominantly move money through cash transfers and informal money transfer systems known as hawalas, the experts said the Islamic State has increasingly used female couriers and hawala systems where data is stored in the cloud to avoid detection, and 'safe drop boxes' where money is deposited at exchange offices and can only be retrieved with a password or code.
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Very British bribery: the whistleblower who exposed the UK's dodgy arms deals with Saudi Arabia
Three days before he fled Saudi Arabia, Ian Foxley was summoned to his boss's office on the 22nd floor of a Riyadh skyscraper and told to either resign or be sacked. He had been in the job for just six months and it was clear to him that something in the organisation was badly wrong – but he did not suspect that he would soon be in fear of his life. It was in May 2010, while reading the Sunday Times at home in a village near York, that Foxley had spotted the job advert. A company was looking for someone to oversee the expansion of a British army programme in Saudi Arabia called Sangcom. Worth £150m when first agreed in 1978, the programme had grown into a £2bn deal for the UK government to supply the Saudi Arabian national guard with everything from encrypted radios to satellite communications and fibre optics. Foxley hadn't heard of Sangcom, but it was well known among graduates of the Royal corps of Signals, the British army specialist communications division, where Foxley had been a lieutenant colonel. In theory, Sangcom was run by a few dozen UK Ministry of Defence specialists in Riyadh; in practice, the programme was almost entirely managed by GPT Special Project Management, a contractor hired by the British government. As and when the Saudis wanted to upgrade their military communications, GPT would draft suggestions for what they might like to buy from the British. In spring 2010, the Saudis decided to buy more equipment via Sangcom, and GPT was hiring someone to put together new spending proposals for them. For Foxley, it seemed like a perfect gig. He had worked a series of contracting jobs since leaving the army in 1998, ranging from project managing fibre optic networks for Tiscali to two years running Domino's Pizza franchises in York. He knew other ex-Signals officers at Sangcom, who reported positive things. A preliminary interview in Dubai went well, and GPT hired him on probation. He arrived in Riyadh in July 2010, and his wife, Emma, planned to follow once he had settled in. Western contractors in Saudi Arabia typically live in compounds: gated communities complete with their own shops, restaurants, swimming pools and tennis courts, all enclosed by 12ft-high concrete walls topped with barbed wire. Foxley's compound, Arizona, had checkpoints patrolled by armed guards and a nine-hole golf course. He described it as 'a luxurious penitentiary', and enjoyed familiarising himself with its thriving culture of illicit home brewing. (There exist specialist online retailers that sell 'bakery kits' and 'cake mix' to western contractors relocating to countries where alcohol is illegal.) Adapting to his new workplace was trickier. GPT's management could be eccentric, he would later recall, and occasionally opaque. On one occasion Jeff Cook, the managing director, abruptly warned Foxley that one of his co-workers, an accountant called Michael Paterson, was 'a madman' who was 'going around saying people were trying to kill him' and that Foxley should not talk to him. Another time, a colleague casually joked about a Saudi general being willing to sign anything GPT suggested, on account of something called 'bought in services'. Foxley didn't recognise the term and when he began asking about it, he received only vague non-answers about 'things we buy in'. At the time, Foxley considered these to be oddities, artefacts of unfamiliar business practices in a foreign country, rather than signs of anything suspicious. In November, however, Cook began criticising Foxley's performance, and accusing him of missing his targets. GPT would later insist these were genuine objections to underperformance, but Foxley believes they were early indications that his questions about 'bought in services' were rattling cages. These tensions culminated, after several increasingly difficult weeks, in the showdown in December where Cook told Foxley to choose between resignation and dismissal. The following day, Foxley went to see David Hargreaves, the brigadier who ran the Ministry of Defence's Sangcom team in Riyadh. Foxley looked 'shaken' and 'shocked', Hargreaves later told a court. According to Foxley, he told Hargreaves that something was gravely wrong with Sangcom, and Hargreaves asked him to provide proof. (Hargreaves remembered it differently: he said the conversation went no further than Foxley asking his advice on how to respond to Cook's resign-or-be-fired ultimatum.) Driving home, mulling his options, Foxley suddenly recalled Michael Paterson, the supposedly lunatic accountant whom Cook had told him not to approach. What on earth had all that been about, he wondered? Once home, he rang Paterson's apartment and introduced himself. A quarter of an hour later, Paterson, who also lived in the Arizona compound, was sitting down at Foxley's dining table. 'Do you know about the Cayman Islands?' Paterson asked. Over the following 90 minutes, the accountant set out a series of discoveries that implicated GPT in years of bribery and corruption. What neither man knew was that the scheme they had stumbled upon had been overseen and authorised for decades, in both Britain and Saudi Arabia, by the highest levels of government. It would be 14 years, three criminal prosecutions and two jury trials before the full truth would emerge. Bribery and corruption has been the lifeblood of the international arms trade for decades. In France, until 1997, corporations were able to offset the cost of bribing foreign officials against their tax bills; in the UK, overseas bribery was declared illegal in 1906, though it wasn't until 2010 that the various loopholes were closed. Arms deals are valued in the millions, if not billions, of dollars, and take place in conditions of extreme secrecy for national security reasons. The products are unique, and can be bundled together with support services or complex financing arrangements, making it near impossible to discern what a fair price should be. According to Robert Barrington, professor of corruption studies at Sussex university, the international arms trade 'is probably the single highest risk sector for corruption, and it has been for years'. The most common form of bribe is the commission or kickback – a percentage of the total value of a deal, usually paid to a middleman, who takes his cut before passing the lion's share on to the politician, prince or president who has ultimate responsibility for deciding how public funds are spent. Upon receipt of the bribe, the decision-maker makes the 'correct' decision as to who wins the contract. Middlemen are essential to such transactions, because they can disguise themselves as consultants offering legitimate services that might explain the payments. In the event that the whole rotten arrangement is exposed, the company paying the bribe can try to claim, however implausibly, that it had no idea the middleman was paying off the decision-maker. Paying the bribes is the easy part; the challenge is concealing them. Any payment leaving a company needs to be explained, lest auditors or regulators get suspicious, but, for obvious reasons, the true nature of the payment can never be recorded. Commission payments are therefore normally obscured under some code or rubric, the more innocuous the better. For the Sangcom deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia, the cipher of choice was 'bought in services'. GPT added a 16% 'bought in services' fee to all of its invoices, then paid those proceeds to a company in the Cayman Islands called Simec. GPT claimed to receive 'bought in services' in exchange. In reality, Simec provided no services and simply acted as a middleman, passing the bribes on to their true recipients. Michael Paterson, the supposedly lunatic accountant, had learned much of this and his career had ground to a halt. Sitting across from Foxley at his dining room table, Paterson, a stout, plainspoken Scotsman, recounted his story. He had joined GPT in 2003 as part of the finance team, and started to hear about 'bought in services' shortly after arriving. He was surprised by the nature of the payments – the flat 16% commission, as well as the degree of secrecy that seemed to surround the arrangement. But it was not his responsibility, and he served contentedly as a financial controller for three years. In 2007, however, GPT was acquired by the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (Eads), and after a corporate reshuffle, Paterson began to feel uncomfortable about signing off the 'bought in services' payments. Sixteen per cent of a British government arms contract worth hundreds of millions of pounds was an enormous amount of money. What were these payments for? And who was receiving them, exactly? On 17 November 2007, Paterson emailed his bosses to record his objections to signing off the payments. On a phone call the following month, which Paterson secretly recorded, Jeff Cook and two other GPT directors put pressure on him to approve the 'bought in services' payments. Paterson refused, hinting loudly that the arrangement was obviously bribery. 'We all know we're paying a percentage of our turnover to a company in the Cayman Islands,' he said. 'We can dress it up however we like, but we all know what it is.' Cook tried to reassure him, insisting that the Ministry of Defence knew about the payments and was comfortable with the arrangement. 'It doesn't make it any more legal!' snapped Paterson. Their disagreement dragged on for more than a year, until June 2009, when Paterson filed a confidential complaint about the arrangement with Eads' internal compliance department. The complaint immediately leaked internally, and within days Cook confronted him. Paterson was stripped of his duties and later placed on gardening leave. Worse still, the Eads compliance officer assigned to his complaint, a Frenchman named Philippe Troyas, seemed to think Paterson's attempts to shine a light on the bought in services payments had placed him in some danger. At one point he texted Paterson: 'Take care when out in public, same for wife.' On 4 November 2009 Paterson met Troyas, secretly armed with his recording device. 'We know these payments are illegal,' he fumed to the compliance officer, in an exchange later played in court. 'Eads knows it, whoever you report to knows it. Why are we having this discussion?' 'Err, because we won't be able to change it,' replied Troyas. 'Eads is going to agree to carry on making illegal payments?' 'Yeah,' said Troyas, adding opaquely, 'it's not in a position to stop it, because [of] the customer willingness.' This admission – that Eads' compliance department was unable or unwilling to prevent corruption despite being handed evidence on a plate – stunned Paterson. 'You can go home and resign, because we don't need you any more!' he exclaimed. 'EADS is a corrupt organisation!' 'I like my company better than ethics, stupidly,' said Troyas. (A spokesperson for Eads' successor organisation, Airbus, said that 'the sentiment expressed in this historical recording is unacceptable and completely at odds with the values and ethical standards of Airbus today'. Troyas could not be reached for comment.) Paterson hired lawyers back in London, who began negotiating a financial settlement with Eads on his behalf. He spent his days on reduced duties – 'surfing the internet, killing time' according to his evidence in court – for almost a year, until 5 December 2010, when Ian Foxley unexpectedly invited him round for a chat. Ever since the age of four or five, Foxley had wanted to be a soldier. He came from a proud military family, and they were pleased to see him following in their footsteps. Both Foxley's grandfathers had been officers in the first world war. His father was an MoD official and his mother was a consultant haematologist, a committed Roman Catholic who enforced weekly attendance at mass. At 16, Foxley entered Welbeck, the military sixth form college, and subsequently joined the army. (Three of his siblings also entered the forces.) His career progressed fast: commissioned out of Sandhurst into the Royal Signals in 1975, stints in Germany, Australia, the Arctic, Belfast, Bosnia; a promotion to captain in 1983 and lieutenant colonel in 1993. Forthright and jovial, with a tendency to speak in short, clipped sentences, Foxley can spend hours happily recounting episodes from his military career or overseas adventures – helping to build a school in the Himalayan foothills, doing a sponsored drive across the Sahara, walking the Camino de Santiago. 'He speaks about integrity a lot, and always did,' said Jim Dryburgh, who was an officer in Foxley's unit. He recalled Foxley taking a dim view of soldiers who had affairs – 'playing the dirty' – while deployed overseas. Hugh Bardell, another officer from the same unit, described an incident early in their shared military career, in which Foxley objected to officers using a large and mostly empty building as an annexe, while the more junior sergeants were relegated to a portable building. Unable to comprehend this obviously unfair use of resources, Foxley went into battle with the chief of staff. He won, but it did him no favours in climbing the career ladder. 'He has been known to do the odd pyrrhic victory bit,' Bardell said. Almost universally, Foxley's friends said he was stubborn, bordering on pugnacious. 'He is so, so intense and strong with his opinions,' said one, a former airborne officer. Another, a former commanding officer, said that 'if he thinks he's right, he will pursue it to the death.' Foxley's rigid sense of right and wrong was set long before he discovered that his father, Gordon, was on the wrong side of the line. One morning in 1989, Foxley, then 33 and serving in Northern Ireland, was summoned by his commanding officer and informed that his father had been arrested for receiving bribes. As head of ammunition procurement for the Ministry of Defence from 1981 to 1984, Gordon Foxley had supplemented his salary of £25,000 a year with at least £1.3m of bribes. In exchange, he had redirected contracts from the Royal Ordnance Factory in Blackburn to European suppliers. Hundreds of employees in Blackburn lost their jobs after the ammunition contracts vanished; the local MP, Jack Straw, described the effect on his constituency as 'devastating'. Gordon was jailed for four years in 1994, though a subsequent attempt to confiscate the bribes he received was prosecuted so ineptly that he escaped ever having to pay restitution. The Evening Standard described it as 'a catalogue of errors so extensive that you quickly stop laughing and start to wonder'. The impact on the Foxley family was devastating. Gordon's pension was confiscated and the family home sold. Foxley's brother Paul was also jailed for six months for destroying evidence; he had been managing his father's accounts. Foxley's mother never recovered from the trauma of the family's bankruptcy and social disgrace. 'It destroyed her,' Foxley told me. His own career prospects in the army were permanently damaged, with his father's conviction obstructing him at every turn. He learned that the chief of defence procurement had been heard observing that it was 'too early to have another Foxley' anywhere near his department. After his father's conviction, Foxley's commitment to integrity – his horror of anything that seemed underhand, unfair or corrupt – intensified. 'I've seen what happens when it goes terribly wrong and the impact it has on your family, and I'm not going to put my wife and children through that,' he told me. 'I know what it was like. It was horrible.' Now, more than 20 years later in Saudi Arabia, sitting across from Paterson, the spectre of corruption was looming over the Foxley name once more. It was obvious to him what he had to do. 'If you don't reveal, you're complicit. It's a very simple equation,' he told me. 'People overcomplicate it. You're either on board, or you're not.' In his conversation with Foxley, Paterson had mentioned a dossier of evidence he had compiled to support his claims. He declined, however, to hand it over to Foxley. And so, at 5am on the following day, 6 December 2010, Foxley drove to GPT's office, hoping to arrive ahead of his boss. Once inside, he located the deputy IT manager and pulled rank, requesting access to Paterson's emails. He located the dossier that Paterson had mentioned and forwarded it to himself, then returned to his desk. He sat down and opened the file. Inside he found emails, contracts, spreadsheets, authorisations for payments to the Cayman Islands. Cook's signature was all over them. Foxley forwarded the documents one by one to a member of the MoD's Sangcom team in Riyadh. He then followed up with a message. 'I think we should discuss this as soon as possible please,' he wrote. Afterwards, he tried to go back to work, his mind racing as he waited for what he assumed would be a priority phone call from the MoD, followed by an invitation to a debrief and the swift commencement of an unstinting investigation. Six hours later, his mobile phone rang. It was not the MoD. 'Ian,' said Jeff Cook. 'Would you come up to the office for a chat please?' Does he know? Foxley asked himself. Was it possible that Michael Paterson had spoken to him since their conversation last night? He took the lift up to Cook's office, where his boss was waiting for him, along with GPT's head of HR, a stern-faced Saudi princess who was a niece of the king. Foxley would later give evidence to a court about the confrontation that ensued: Cook demanded to know if it was true Foxley had been sending documents to the MoD. There was no point in lying, Foxley thought. He confirmed that he had. Cook accused him of theft, and threatened to call the police and have him arrested and jailed. He turned to the princess, telling her to cut off Foxley's access to the IT system. The Saudi princess stalked out of the office, clutching her phone. Foxley recalls Cook continuing to berate him for what he had done, but Foxley could barely hear him. Instead, his mind followed the king's niece out of the office, as he suddenly began imagining how the next few minutes might play out: the princess ordering the police to come to the office. Arrest, detention. 'Time just slows down, you're thinking so quickly,' Foxley told me. 'I was just thinking, if the princess rings the police and says 'come and arrest you for theft', you're dead. I mean, literally.' Foxley realised he had one objective and one objective only: get out of the building as quickly as possible. He stood up abruptly. 'This conversation's not going anywhere, Jeff,' he announced, before marching out of the office. Cook bellowed at him to come back, but Foxley made for the lift, determined to get out before the princess returned with the police. As the lift descended, he rang his contact at the MoD and relayed what had happened. The contact told Foxley to get in his car and drive to the MoD offices in Riyadh. As Foxley raced down the highway, he worried that the police might know his registration number and stop him. 'You become very paranoid,' he recalled. Halfway there, the contact rang again and told him to urgently change direction and instead meet them at the MoD residential compound; Foxley swung his car around a roundabout and sped off. Once he arrived, he learned what had happened after he leaked Paterson's dossier: Foxley's contact had shown the documents to Brig Hargreaves, the MoD's Sangcom lead in Saudi Arabia, who then immediately contacted MoD headquarters in Whitehall to ask for instructions. Rather than notify anti-corruption police, Whitehall had ordered Hargreaves to hand the documents over to GPT. At this stage the significance of the dossier, or who it might implicate, was not clear to Foxley, or any of those present. But all, including Foxley's MoD contacts, agreed that he needed to get out of Saudi Arabia immediately. 'I think that the threat of arrest and jail – and the implication of that when you're in the hands of the Saudi royal family – was too much [for the MoD],' Foxley said. 'They could not deal with that, and didn't want the implications of what that might turn into.' They discussed various options for an exit – trying to fly out of Jeddah undetected, or crossing the border to Bahrain – before deciding that simply getting the first commercial flight out of Riyadh was the best option. If Foxley was arrested, at least his friends would know where he was. Foxley drove home and packed a bag, then handed his apartment keys to a friend. (Fearing Saudi authorities might use illicit alcohol as a pretext for arrest, the friend later conscripted two soldiers into helping him destroy evidence, consuming six jugs of wine and a dustbin of beer hidden in Foxley's airing cupboard.) Then, as night fell, Foxley's friend drove him to the airport. At security, his friend wished him good luck and told him to text when the aircraft doors had closed. Doing his best to act casual, Foxley told passport control that urgent business had summoned him back to London. When the plane took off, shortly after 1am, Foxley was on board. For Britain, Saudi Arabia has long been an exceedingly useful partner. In 1965, the Labour government commissioned a report by the head of the carmaker British Leyland, Donald Stokes, on revitalising the arms manufacturing industry. 'I believe it is vital to the country's interest that the firms should adopt the right attitude to exports, in arms as in every other field, and I think we must be prepared to be quite ruthless in bringing that about,' Stokes wrote. When Stokes wrote his report, Saudi Arabia was not yet half a century old. Flush with oil money, it was busy buying all the accoutrements of a modern nation state, including arms, and there was intense competition between western nations over which country should be the one to supply them. Britain was exporting £130m of arms globally each year, but Stokes thought this was a fraction of what was on offer. A barrister for Jeff Cook would later summarise the scene as a 'postcolonial battle between Britain, America and France; who can grab as much as possible out of this super-rich country, oil swilling everywhere, money everywhere.' An entire ecosystem of middlemen emerged to service this lucrative new sector, forging introductions between western corporations and Gulf royalty. 'Good commercial agents will be of the greatest value,' Stokes wrote in his report. 'Apart from providing an additional source of information, they are better placed than an official to dispense less orthodox inducements' – that is, to pass on bribes to powerful individuals, in return for those figures agreeing to use the national coffers to buy arms from Britain rather than from other countries. Stokes's attitude was codified in a 1977 memo by the MoD permanent secretary, the year after Sangcom was established. Payments to middlemen, the permanent secretary acknowledged, were a 'difficult and sensitive area'. Civil servants should endeavour to cap them at 10% of a contract value, he said, exceeding this threshold only 'with great caution'. Bribery was part of Sangcom from the start. Government documents from the 1960s and 1970s identify Prince Abdullah, then head of the Saudi Arabia national guard, as the primary recipient of British backhanders in exchange for signing off military deals. Two episodes from subsequent decades suggest that officials of the British government fully understood the role of bribery within Sangcom. In 1994, when GPT first won the Sangcom contract (it was previously handled by Cable and Wireless), one of its directors, Geoff Simmons, was summoned to a meeting in Whitehall. There, he said, the MoD's head of arms sales informed him that somewhere in the bowels of the building was a sealed letter, signed by representatives of the British and Saudi governments, affirming that the payments to Saudi royals and their associates were necessary for the smooth running of Sangcom. (The MoD says it cannot find this letter.) GPT, Simmons later said in evidence to a court, was instructed by the British government to send money to a company called Simec, which would then pass it on to the relevant beneficiaries – the very same 'bought in services' arrangement later discovered by Paterson. The second episode was in 2007. In an email from that year, Jeff Cook, who was then an MoD civil servant on secondment to GPT, informed his boss that, after some setbacks, he had successfully obtained written approval from the British government for a new round of 'bought in services' payments. The letter 'provides the government top cover that we wanted,' Cook wrote. 'It also makes us 'clean'.' In other words, because the government had signed off on the bribes, nobody at GPT could be held responsible. 'This,' Cook wrote, 'is a considerable achievement and a relief.' Back in Britain, having fled Riyadh, Foxley spent several weeks trying to compute what had just happened. 'It took a long time for the details to come out to us,' his daughter Jessica told me. 'I think he was almost in shock at one point.' He began to ruminate upon the possibility of Saudi agents pursuing him. At one point he sent copies of documents to a small number of friends and family, with covering notes declaring he had no plans to kill himself. If they found him dead, he wanted them to know he had been murdered. Foxley had not yet realised that the dodgy payments to Simec discovered by Paterson were not the result of a private contractor going rogue, but had, in fact, been signed off by the British government itself. And so, after three weeks mulling his options, he visited a senior civil servant at the offices of the MoD's arms sales division in Corsham, Wiltshire. Unless an investigation was launched into the dossier, Foxley said, he would go to anti-corruption specialists at the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) directly. The MoD seemed to take Foxley's threat seriously, and the case was referred to the SFO, where Paul Brinkworth, an agency veteran, was assigned to investigate the case in the autumn of 2012. Most SFO tips are isolated pieces of information, and witnesses are often reluctant to give evidence. Public spirited whistleblowers with large bundles of documents are rare. Brinkworth quickly realised that Foxley would make a compelling witness for any potential jury. 'Because of his family background, and the burden, to an extent, that his name placed on him, he was never going to tolerate corruption in any walk of life,' Brinkworth told me. 'When he thought he was encountering it he would call it out, and that's how he came across.' In other respects, however, the case was a nightmare. Sangcom had a five-decade history that would need to be explained to a jury, and the fact that the case involved the Saudis was also ominous. Six years earlier the SFO's reputation had been seriously tarnished by the collapse of an investigation into a British-Saudi deal bigger even than Sangcom: al-Yamamah, a monster £43bn deal for British arms manufacturer BAE Systems to supply the Saudis with fighter jets. This deal, too, had its origins in secret payments, with commissions of up to £30m being paid every few months to a Saudi prince called Bandar. When Bandar discovered in 2007 that he was being investigated by the SFO, he issued an ultimatum to Tony Blair's government: either the SFO's inquiries ended, or the Saudis would stop sharing intelligence on terrorist activity. Blair ordered that the SFO investigation be shut down. Anti-corruption groups denounced the decision. A judicial review to reverse Blair's intervention failed, though not before two high court judges mournfully observed that 'so bleak a picture of the impotence of the law invites at least dismay, if not outrage.' Battered by near universal condemnation of its apparent tolerance of corruption, Britain appeared to change its ways. A fully fledged Bribery Act was passed in 2010, which among other things clarified that employees of a firm committing bribery could no longer plead that they were merely following orders. The MoD declared that its 'policy towards irregularity, fraud, theft, bribery and corruption is one of zero tolerance' and established a specialist oversight board to fight graft. Later, in 2013, the prime minister, David Cameron, told the G7 that Britain would lead a global crusade against bribery and corruption. Finally, it seemed as if the country was cleaning up its act – just as Foxley arrived at the SFO's door with a bundle of documents that threatened to drag the ugly truth back into the light. For almost two years, Brinkworth and his colleagues at the SFO worked quietly, interviewing witnesses and piecing together cash transfers between bank accounts in Saudi Arabia, Britain, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland to uncover the secrets behind Sangcom. Then, early one morning in July 2014, SFO officers sprang into action. In coordinated dawn raids, key figures from GPT and Simec, including Foxley's old boss Jeff Cook, were arrested. In a prepared statement for an interview at Bishopsgate police station, Cook denied any wrongdoing. 'My aim has simply been to follow the procedures set out in the contracts, all of which had been approved by the [then] king of Saudi Arabia and the UK Ministry of Defence and have been in place for decades,' he said. SFO prosecutions require signoff by the attorney general, and for several years after the arrests were made, the government dragged its feet as to whether the SFO should be allowed to bring the case to trial, before relenting in 2020. Meanwhile, Foxley was struggling. In the years after he first handed the evidence to the SFO, he had heard nothing about how the case was developing. After word got around that he had become a whistleblower, work as a contractor, which had previously been abundant, dried up. There was a strange irony in the fact that two decades earlier, his career had suffered as a result of his father's corruption; now, it felt as if he was being punished for trying to root corruption out. 'My dad's always had a very steady job and an income, and it's never been a worry. And then suddenly it was,' said Jessica. Foxley's wife, Emma, went back to full-time work as a teacher so the family could make ends meet. Bardell, who had known Foxley for three decades, observed that he became 'distinctly introvert, very unlike the Ian that I have grown to know'. Experiencing people turn their backs on him was, for Foxley, 'a little bit of a surprise, and I think a great sadness,' Bardell said. 'He's probably a little bit of an idealist, in that he will always think the best of anybody, until somebody proves him wrong.' As his frustrations grew, Foxley turned his ire on prosecutors. 'The longer it takes, the more embarrassing it will become,' he fumed in a letter to the attorney general. At the SFO, Brinkworth also took his share of incoming fire. 'Your staff, from successive directors downwards, have been outstandingly close-lipped about either your progress and intentions or timetable,' Foxley ranted in another missive. 'One day I will reveal the disappointment, frustration, and despair that the past eight years have brought and the secondary effects they have wrought on my family.' In these messages, it is easy to detect the pained disappointment of someone with faith in the system now having to face its flaws. What is perhaps most surprising about the whole saga is how surprised Foxley was by it. One of his friends told me he could not understand how Foxley could not have known bribery was rife in Saudi Arabia. And surely, given the crimes of his father, himself an MoD official, Foxley must have known that it was not impossible that there were government officials involved in the corruption at GPT. But when I made these points to Foxley, he was insistent that when he took the job at GPT, the possibility of corruption on Sangcom had never occurred to him. 'This was a government to government contract!' he exclaimed, incredulously. And it seemed that his father's offences had made him think corruption in an MoD contract was less likely rather than more. 'It's unconscionable that the MoD, who had pursued him so hurriedly for corruption, would actually be party to corruption. I mean, it just doesn't make sense,' he argued. 'Maybe I'm naive. I don't live in a world of horrible things.' It was not until more than a decade after Foxley blew the whistle that any cases relating to Sangcom finally reached court. In July 2020, it was announced that GPT as a corporate entity would face trial for corruption, as would Cook and Simec's accountant, a man called John Mason. (Simec's mastermind, Peter Austin, was too ill to face trial. He died in early 2024.) In 2021, GPT pleaded guilty to corruption. In sentencing remarks, the judge found that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the British government had known about Simec's role in forging arms deals between Saudi Arabia and Britain; it had also known about 'high-level Saudi individuals who benefited from corrupt payments'. Some civil servants, he said, 'may have known about, or turned a blind eye to, the payment of bribes over many years.' This was the moment when Foxley finally realised how deep the corruption went. Soldiers, he said, don't tend to think much about the Ministry of Defence. 'It's where the politicians and the accountants live,' he said. 'The bean-stealers or the bean-counters.' But the judge's sentencing remarks revealed that his assumption that the government could not have been involved had been dead wrong. Not only had the government ratted him out to GPT when he discovered the bribery conspiracy, it had in fact played a decisive role in organising the conspiracy in the first place. Until then, 'I did not realise the involvement of the MoD,' Foxley told me. 'I had no idea.' The following year, in front of a jury at Southwark crown court, the SFO commenced its prosecution of Cook and Mason. (GPT's guilty plea was kept secret from the jury so as not to prejudice their trial.) Foxley was the SFO's star witness, recounting for the jury his discovery of the Paterson dossier, the MoD exposing him for whistleblowing, his dramatic escape from Riyadh. In his cross-examination of Foxley, Ian Winter, counsel for the defence, sought to suggest that Foxley was no whistleblower at all, but rather an opportunistic incompetent who had turned on his employer because he had been threatened with dismissal. Foxley's pugnacious streak kicked in. 'Are you trying to besmirch my professional reputational capabilities?' he barked. 'Is that where you're headed with this?' Winter suggested Foxley was puffing himself up. 'You are trying to demean my professional capabilities for the advantage of doing down my character and invalidating my information!' snapped Foxley. 'It doesn't invalidate the invoices and the payments to Simec. You can do your worst, sir!' Farcically, two months into the case the trial collapsed when it emerged that the MoD had failed to disclose key evidence. A second trial, with a fresh jury, began in October 2023. As with the first trial, all parties – including the defendants – agreed that the 'bought in services' payments were made to ensure the continuation of the Sangcom contract. Eight Saudis received a collective £10m between 2007 and 2012 alone. The question for the jury was whether the British and Saudi governments had authorised the payments in the window between 2007 and 2010, the period when the SFO had its most solid evidence of a money trail from GPT to the Saudis. If they had, Cook and Mason were innocent. In other words, if GPT, the British government and the Saudis had knowingly approved a corrupt deal, then legally speaking, any employees carrying out that corrupt deal were not themselves corrupt. In March 2024, after almost 40 hours of jury deliberation, both Cook and Mason were acquitted. Their defence – that the British government had authorised the entire scheme – had won out. Cook was convicted by the jury of a separate charge of taking kickbacks while he was a civil servant at the MoD, before he went to work for GPT. He had commissioned reports from a consultant in exchange for cash and cars, including a Nissan Primera. Foxley was in the gallery to watch his old boss get sent down for 30 months. In one of our conversations, Foxley described Cook as 'a grubby little crook, quite frankly.' But, he added, 'by the same call, so was my father.' Despite the acquittals of Cook and Mason, Paul Brinkworth, the corruption investigator at the SFO, spoke of Sangcom almost as a deliverance for his agency. When Foxley blew the whistle on Sangcom, people had warned that this would just be a repeat of the BAE case: the government would simply crush any attempt to investigate Britain's deals with Saudi Arabia. Instead, GPT had pleaded guilty, and 'the most sensitive, the most embarrassing, difficult case, which the government really has every reason not to like, has been aired, in all its grim glory, in a Southwark court.' Even so, reaction to full exposure of the Sangcom arrangement has been strikingly muted. Parliament's defence committee has exhibited zero interest in the case. There has been no mea culpa from the MoD. After the trial, it issued a short statement applauding Cook's conviction for the unrelated misconduct offence. It said nothing about historic government complicity in the Sangcom bribes. When I asked for a comment on Foxley's account of the saga, a press officer told me 'we have a zero tolerance approach to misconduct' and said staff were expected to observe government and military codes of conduct. Cook, who has been released from prison, told me in an email via his lawyers that: 'I accept the findings of the jury [in March 2024], which found me not guilty of the corruption charge, and now consider this matter closed.' The Sangcom debacle has not diminished the UK's appetite for Saudi cooperation. In December 2024 Keir Starmer travelled to the Gulf to champion closer relationships in the region. After his visit to Saudi Arabia, a British government press release touted an increased 'strategic partnership between the two countries' that would 'pave the way for greater defence industrial cooperation.' Starmer reportedly invited Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's crown prince, to Downing Street and suggested they watch a football game together. In one of my conversations with Foxley, I asked whether the whole ordeal had been worth it. He replied in the affirmative instantly, but not without regrets. Blowing the whistle to the MoD rather than the police, he said, had been an initial, fateful mistake that altered how everything else played out. 'My biggest disappointment, and my biggest failure, was in trusting a team of people that by rights I should have been able to trust,' he said. The MoD and the government 'had been running the scam, the bribery, since 1978, ever since the project was set up'. Foxley is now suing the Ministry of Defence for the damage to his livelihood and career caused by blowing the whistle. 'Part of not giving up this – I don't want to call it a crusade – this pathway I'm on, to assure accountability of the MoD, part of it has to be the fact that when they arrested [my father] and prosecuted him, they were quite relentless in doing so,' Foxley said. 'At the same time, they were paying bribes to the Saudis, and had been for 30 years. So the rank hypocrisy of it actually hurts.' After he fled Riyadh, Foxley spoke to his father. 'I told him everything. Everything I knew,' he said. 'I couldn't be certain but I thought what it was was corruption.' I asked how his father had responded, given his own history with corruption. ''Well, you know,' Foxley replied matter-of-factly. ''Well done. Carry on. Follow it through.'' It was, he said, a surprisingly straightforward conversation for them both, despite their very different choices. 'By then he was resigned to the fact that he had done wrong and got caught and paid the price for it,' he said. His father's past was, for the most part, left where it belonged, and 'we didn't really talk about [it] at all.' One weekend in 2013 when Foxley went to visit him, Gordon Foxley told his son that he was sorry for what he had done. 'He did actually say that it was one of the things he regretted in his life,' Foxley said. It was the first time Gordon had expressed remorse for his crime. He died the following week. A court will rule on whether Foxley's claim against the MoD should be dismissed early next year. If not, it will proceed to trial. He has accepted the prospect of the case continuing to hang over him; it will be worth it, he thinks, if it results in the government changing its ways. 'They shouldn't get away with it,' he said, 'and they shouldn't be allowed to think that they can do it again.' Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Israeli military chiefs 'are clashing over civilian killings in Gaza'
Israeli military chiefs fell out in an explosive shouting match over the sheer number of Palestinians killed by IDF airstrikes, according to local media. Major General Yaniv Asor, head of the army's southern command, is said to have complained to the air force that it was consistently overruling bombing requests for targets in Gaza, which has already been decimated since Israel began its siege of the enclave. In response, Major General Tomer Bar, the head of Israel's air force, said that many of requests made by Asor's subordinates were killing civilians and showed a 'lack of professionalism.' Local media reported that the argument only spiralled from there, resulting in the senior military figures screaming at each other in front of top officers. The spat required Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, chief of staff at the IDF to intervene, witnesses said. The argument reflects a deep division within Benjamin Netanyahu 's government over what the future, vis-a-vis Gaza, ought to look like. Earlier this week, Netanyahu told the military to prepare for a full takeover of the Gaza Strip, including areas where hostages are being held. A source in the Prime Minister's Office told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that the message had been passed on to IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir saying: 'If this does not suit you, then you should resign.' Israeli soldiers walking next to damaged buildings as smoke billows during a military operation in the north of the Gaza Strip amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas It comes as Netanyahu prepares to meet with top officials to decide on the next steps in Gaza and what to do about the remaining hostages. An Israeli official told The Jerusalem Post: 'The prime minister is considering all available options regarding the next steps.' Hamas, however, has brushed off talks of an Israeli takeover. The group said: 'Israel's threats are repetitive, worthless, and have no influence on our decisions.' But a political analyst with Channel 12 quoted an unnamed official saying: 'Hamas won't release more hostages without total surrender, and we won't surrender. 'If we don't act now, the hostages will starve to death and Gaza will remain under Hamas's control. ' According to reports, the prime minister used the phrase 'occupation of the Strip' in private conversations while describing his intentions for Gaza. If Netanyahu's plans are successful, the Israeli military could extend its reach across the whole region, according to local reports. It currently holds 75 percent of the Strip. He is now set to take the plans to his cabinet to seek their backing for the plan. In a video message, Netanyahu said he was 'committing to free Gaza from the tyranny of these terrorists'. According to The Times of Israel, the IDF is against the proposal and has said it would take a significant amount of time to clear infrastructure belonging to Hamas.
The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Only 1.5% of Gaza cropland left for starving Palestinians due to Israel's war, UN says
Israel's destruction of Gaza has left starving Palestinians with access to only 1.5% of cropland that is accessible and suitable for cultivation, according to new figures from the UN. This is down from 4% in April, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), suggesting Israel has continued to target Palestinian farmland since initiating a complete blockade in early March, severely restricting aid from entering the Gaza Strip, where 2 million starved people are trapped. Before the conflict, Gaza was a thriving agricultural hub, where farmers and ordinary Palestinians cultivated a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains for local consumption. According to the FAO, agriculture accounted for around 10% of the Gaza Strip's economy, and more than 560,000 people, or a quarter of the population, were at least partially supported by agriculture and fishing. Israel has targeted food sources – orchards, greenhouses, farmland and fishers – since the beginning of its siege on Gaza in October 2023. By 28 July 2025, Israel had damaged 86%, the equivalent of almost 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres), of farmland in the Gaza Strip – up from 81% in April, the FAO said. While just under 9% of cropland is still physically accessible, only 1.5% – the equivalent of 232 hectares – is both accessible and not damaged by the Israeli offensive. 'Gaza is now on the brink of a full-scale famine. People are starving not because food is unavailable, but because access is blocked, local agrifood systems have collapsed, and families can no longer sustain even the most basic livelihoods,' said FAO director-general Qu Dongyu. 'We urgently need safe and sustained humanitarian access and immediate support to restore local food production and livelihoods – this is the only way to prevent further loss of life. The right to food is a basic human right.' In northern Gaza, Israeli tanks and bombs have destroyed or damaged 94% of what was among the most fertile, productive land in the territory, and Palestinians have no access to the remaining 6% of their cropland. In Rafah, near the Egypt border, 79% is flattened and the rest has been blocked as part of Israel's so-called military corridor. Last week, Israeli forces partially demolished a seed bank in Hebron, in the West Bank, destroying tools and equipments used to used to reproduce heirloom seeds. UN experts, agencies and aid groups have been warning since early 2024 that Israel is orchestrating a campaign of deliberate mass starvation in Gaza by systematically destroying local food production and blocking aid, in violation of international law. Hundreds of Palestinians have now starved to death, and thousands more have been killed trying to access food aid. Earlier this week, Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told the Guardian: 'Israel has built the most efficient starvation machine you can imagine. So while it's always shocking to see people being starved, no one should act surprised. All the information has been out in the open since early 2024.'
