The successful prosecution of Britain’s Mabey & Johnson for corrupt payments and overpricing in Angola, Ghana, Madagascar and Mozambique appears to have emboldened London’s Serious Fraud Office. Within days of the conclusion of the case under a plea bargain in which the company’s management paid some £6.5 million (US$10.5 mn.) in fines and made full disclosure of its payments, the SFO said it would use the same tactics against BAE Systems, Britain’s largest arms manufacturer. The stakes are much higher for BAE, which faces investigations on corrupt payments and contract overpricing in South Africa, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Czech Republic, Qatar and Chile. If the SFO had secured a plea bargaining deal with BAE in those cases, BAE would be liable for hundreds of millions of pounds in fines. Instead, it refuses to negotiate with the SFO, perhaps calculating that as one of Britain’s biggest companies it can rely on protection from Whitehall. In 2006, Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened to stop the SFO’s investigation into BAE’s £43 bn. Al Yamamah contract with Saudi Arabia. Now the SFO will bring charges against BAE, which may be helped by pressure from its foreign clients on Whitehall to stop the cases. An associate of South Africa’s former President Thabo Mbeki, who presided over the BAE deal, told Africa Confidential that ‘under present conditions I don’t think the British government will be very keen to destroy one of their country’s most profitable companies.’