Pay radar money to us, Tanzania government tells SFO

The SFO believes that this money was used to pay bribes to Tanzanian politicians and officials to approve the deal.Mr Vithlani left Tanzania after the country’s Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau accused him of lying to investigators.

He is listed as wanted by Interpol.Dick Oliver, BAE Systems chairman, admitted only that his firm “made commission payments to a marketing adviser and failed to accurately record such payments in its accounting records... The company failed to scrutinise these records adequately to ensure that they were reasonably accurate and permitted them to remain uncorrected.”

Now, UK prosecutors plan to send the money from the bribery-probe settlement to Tanzania. British High Commissioner to Tanzania Diane Corner told The EastAfrican in Dar es Salaam last week that under the proposed settlement, the SFO will ask that most of the £30 million BAE is paying, go to Tanzania as the agency’s director, Richard Alderman, pushes to return money to corruption victims.

Mark Mandelssohn, former chief of the Fraud Division at the US Department of Justice, told The EastAfrican that, “There is a grave danger that you’re returning money to the very people who took the bribes in the first place.”

However, Bernard Membe, Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation told The EastAfrican that Tanzania cannot let the money be donated to charitable organisations, “because it belongs to the government of Tanzania and it is the state that should decide how to use its recovered funds.”

Mr Membe said Britain should not dictate the use of the money by Tanzania when the US government in a similar arrangement was being refunded directly and not through individual organisations.

In February, the British Serious Fraud Office and the US Department of Justice reached settlements with BAE Systems in a ground breaking global agreement that involved BAE’s business dealings in a number of countries including Tanzania.