Documents from 2004 court case show how Rolls-Royce and other firms pressed government to water down plans

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Rolls-Royce, which this week agreed to pay £671m in penalties after admitting it had engaged in corruption, lobbied ministers to weaken proposed curbs on bribery a decade ago.



The effort to dilute anti-bribery regulations was conducted under the leadership of Sir John Rose, the firm’s chief executive until 2011, who is facing calls from Labour to be stripped of his knighthood after the bribery settlement.

Documents from a 2004 court case show how Rolls-Royce, in alliance with other multinationals, exerted pressure on the government to water down proposals that were intended to combat bribery.

Tony Blair’s government had proposed strengthening rules to stop bribery in contracts that were supported by the UK’s export credit agency and ministers said they were stepping up efforts to prevent UK businesses paying bribes to secure contracts overseas.

The documents detail how Rolls-Royce and the other multinationals objected to the proposals and began privately to lobby against them.

Minutes of a meeting in July 2004 show that Rolls-Royce told civil servants it refused to disclose any details of its middlemen to the government as they saw these arrangements as strictly private.

At another meeting the following month, Rolls-Royce and the other firms again argued for secrecy on the grounds that they “operated in a particular environment” that “was very competitive with a small number of large companies”.

“These competitors would gain a major commercial advantage if they knew who [Rolls-Royce]’s intermediaries were. These details were very commercially sensitive. The network of agents/intermediaries was a valuable asset built up over a number of years and offered important commercial advantages such as being able to open doors … Even within the companies the names were restricted to a small number of senior employees,” the minutes record.

The then Labour government subsequently diluted the anti-bribery proposals. That decision was challenged in a legal action brought by the anti-corruption campaign group Corner House. As a result, the lobbying documents were released.

Sue Hawley, an anti-corruption campaigner involved in the legal action, said: “Clearly Rolls-Royce didn’t want any scrutiny of its agents and commission payments because its main business model was paying bribes via agents to win contracts.”

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In his judgment approving the Rolls-Royce settlement this week, Sir Brian Leveson described how the firm had systemically used middlemen to funnel “truly vast corrupt payments” to secure contracts.

The bribes were paid to win contracts in countries including Indonesia, China, Russia, Thailand, Iraq and Angola, earning more than £250m in profits.

Leveson found that the corruption involved “senior (on the face of it, very senior) Rolls-Royce employees” and disclosed how Rolls-Royce had changed its procedures for approving payments to its middlemen. In 2003, payments over a certain threshold had to be specifically approved by the chief executive, a post occupied at the time by Rose.

The Guardian asked Rose, who led the company between 1996 and 2011, how many times he had approved payments to middlemen over this threshold. Rose declined to answer. He has not made any comment since the settlement was announced on Monday.

On Wednesday, the shadow secretary of state for international trade, Barry Gardiner, said Rose could not credibly retain his knighthood after Rolls-Royce admitted it was responsible for “egregious criminality over decades” during his term as chief executive.

Leveson said in his ruling that he had approved the deal to halt the investigations as he was satisfied that Rolls-Royce had changed its management team since prosecutors began to look at evidence of the corruption in 2012.



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