A former Ministry of Defence civil servant has been jailed for 30 months after being convicted of misconduct in public office.
Jeffrey Cook, 67, received more than £70,000 of payments and gifts as kickbacks on a public contract that he arranged while he was an employee at the MoD between 2004 and 2008.
Last month a jury at Southwark crown court found Cook guilty after hearing that, while he was on secondment, he commissioned a series of reports from an offshore company, ME Consultants. The offshore company was paid about £700,000 for the work.
ME Consultants then paid Cook about 10% of its fee as a kickback. He received more than £44,000 in cash and two cars worth £30,000 according to Serious Fraud Office prosecutors.
When first interviewed by the SFO, Cook initially lied and claimed that the money represented expenses he had incurred during business trips in Saudi Arabia. He later accepted that they were commissions but argued that they had been authorised.
In sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Picken told Cook: “You made a personal gain at the expense of the public purse, receiving money that could otherwise be used for the benefit of the public.”
Tom Allen KC, representing Cook, had urged the judge to impose a suspended sentence, citing Cook’s advanced age, his previous good character, and the toll that a 12-year prosecution had already taken on his life.
However the judge said he had concluded that the appropriate sentence for Cook’s offence was longer than the two years that might have allowed it to be suspended.
Cook was also ordered to pay a confiscation order of about £124,000 and a contribution to prosecution costs of £25,000.
Cook and another man had also been tried for corruption offences in respect of almost £10m of bribes on an MoD arms deal in Saudi Arabia. The men had argued that millions of pounds of payments to Saudi officials did not legally constitute corruption because the MoD had approved them. The jury found both men not guilty.
After the men’s acquittal, the anti-corruption campaign group Spotlight on Corruption called for an immediate investigation into MoD complicity in bribery. Dr Susan Hawley, the group’s executive director, repeated that demand after Cook’s sentencing on Friday.
“While Jeffrey Cook’s sentence of 30 months’ imprisonment will no doubt be seen as harsh given he was acquitted on corruption charges, it’s hard not to look at this case and think that the key players who engaged in the bribery scheme at the heart of this case, including those who signed it off in government, have been left entirely unscathed,” she said.
“After what has emerged in the course of this trial, it is essential that the National Audit Office now steps up and examines the exact nature of Ministry of Defence involvement in a bribery scheme admitted by GPT, who Cook later worked for, and whether the MOD has now properly cleaned up its act.”
