‘UK arms deals obfuscating to hide reality of sales’
A London-based professor of economics says the details of Britain’s weapons contracts are shrouded in secrecy “to hide the reality that the UK supplies arms to the most anti-democratic regimes.”
Professor Rodney Shakespeare believes, “The UK system of allegedly licensing the sales of arms is deliberately confusing and obfuscating, the purpose of which is to hide the reality that the UK supplies arms to the most gruesome, authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes in the world.”
His comments come as British lawmakers say the government is helping to conceal the scale of the country’s arms trade by encouraging the use of licenses, which obscure payments and those making the purchases from public view.
The MPs’ report was published by the Committees on Arms Export Control (CAEC), which was composed of four influential select committees, covering defense, foreign policy, business and development.
It found that the Export Control Organization (ECO), which oversees military equipment sales, urges traders to apply for a less accountable form of license, the use of which could hinder oversight, allowing ethically questionable deals to be brokered in secret, RT reported.
Now Professor Shakespeare says, “The key point there is: it is the supply of arms to the anti-democratic regimes. Some of those countries are actually on the UK’s own list of human rights abusers.
“But the point is this that in the UK and in the UK Foreign Office, there is a belief that there is something called ‘UK interests’ which must always be served and that it is in the long-term interest of the UK to serve them. Those interests are usually, almost certainly a narrow range of a sale of arms,” he told Press TV’s UK Desk on Sunday.
Over the last five years, UK officials have increasingly urged exporters to use a more opaque licensing system called an Open Individual Export License (OIEL), figures uncovered by The Independent suggest.
The licenses permit an unlimited number of arms shipments to be transported to specified destinations over five years from the date of issue.
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