BAE Systems Annual General Meeting 2006

BAE Systems is the 4th biggest arms company in the world. Each year it sells around £11 billion of arms around the globe.

These weapons are sold indiscriminately to a wide customer base – to regimes with appalling human rights records, regions involved in devastating conflicts, and impoverished countries with huge development needs.

Without help from the British taxpayer, BAE Systems wouldn't be able to make such a killing. DESO, the Government's arms sales unit, provides financial and political support to BAES and the company enjoys a significant proportion of the estimated £900 million of public money used to subsidise private arms companies exporting weapons. No other industry gets such blatant corporate welfare.

Last December the UK Government announced that it had brokered a multi-billion pound deal to sell Eurofighter Typhoon fighter planes made by BAE Systems to Saudi Arabia. The deal had Tony Blair's personal support despite the appalling human record of the Saudi regime and despite ongoing investigations by the Serious Fraud Office into allegations that bribes were paid by BAE Systems to members of the Saudi Royal Family involved in a previous UK-Saudi arms deal.

The AGM

CAAT holds a number of 'token shares' in BAE Systems which enables us to attend the company's Annual General Meeting and challenge it about its deadly trade. In May 2006, around 40 CAAT supporters attended the AGM and dominated questions to the company's board members on a number of issues.

Supporters challenged the company on its continued contribution to conflict and human rights abuses around the world – particularly by supplying arms and services to Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. One shareholder highlighted the fact that around 80% of victims in conflict are civilians; another asked the chair directly whether he empathised with victims who have been maimed or killed by BAE products. The Chairman, Dick Olver, replied by saying that he believed that 'BAE supplies products to make the world a safer place' and that 'the people in the company are proud of their contribution to stability in the world'.

To questions about BAE Systems supplying arms to countries which perpetrated human rights abuses or broke United Nations resolutions the Chairman tried to escape responsibility by stating that all transfers were sanctioned by the UK Government. So, another win for the arms companies thanks to ineffectiveness of the Export Control Act - legislation which includes criteria that pays lip service to human rights, development and conflict issues, but has so far done nothing to limit arms exports around the world. Other "factors" within the criteria state that the UK's military industrial base should be taken into account when granting licenses and thus provides the government with get-out clauses with which to justify arms exports. It is not just ironic to remember that these “factors” within the law were in added in 2002 in response to BAE Systems' desire to sell components destined for incorporation in US-made jets being supplied to Israel and used against Palestinian civilians.

When a CAAT supporter, an Iraqi man who has had first hand experience of the horror of cluster bombs, got up to ask the board whether BAE Systems was supplying cluster bombs, Olver asserted that BAE Systems did not. Another supporter then asked about cluster bombs again, citing a Parliamentary question in which a minister for the MoD confirmed that cluster bombs parts had been puchased from Royal Ordnance, a subsidiary of BAE Systems. To this the Chairman admitted that BAE subsidiaries might procure cluster bombs as part of a larger MoD order, something he didn't seem to see as contradicting his earlier assertion.

Chairman Dick Olver was next forced to field a number of questions regarding its apparent ability to by-pass democracy and influence Government policy, and allegations of corruption – specifically the way in which it had lobbied the Government to water-down the anti-bribery procedures of the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) and the investigations of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into suspected false accounting and corruption. The chairman denied the first, and on the second stated that BAE had 'done nothing wrong'.

Meanwhile, outside the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre where the AGM was held, other CAAT supporters were making a very public peaceful protest – drawing the attention of passers-by to the devastating trade being discussed inside the building. Several supporters donned masks and costumes to highlight the way in which Tony Blair and other Ministers have played poodle to BAE Systems, rolling over to provide them with tax-payers money, helpful legislation and free-marketing on their behalf, not least in the form of DESO (the Defence Export Services Organisation). Mike Turner was depicted leading Tony Blair, John Reid (former Defence Secretary) and Jack Straw (former Foreign Secretary) on dog leashes in front of a signpost pointing to Saudi Arabia. A fitting picture to be spread across the pages of national newspapers the next day.

See the pictures from the protest outside.

Read the action report from 2005.