UK ignores corruption scandals when awarding major military contracts

The Ministry of Defence is reportedly set to award a £2 billion contract to a consortium led by Raytheon UK despite major corruption and fraud violations recently levelled against its American parent company RTX.

The contract, which aims to modernise the army’s training infrastructure using “advanced simulation”, will be awarded through a competitive process in which Raytheon UK seeks to displace a rival bid led by Israel’s Elbit Systems UK.

RTX is already a major supplier to the UK Ministry of Defence, having completed integration trials for the Paveway precision-guided missile on the Typhoon aircraft in 2025.

The company says it has a “decades-long partnership with the British army”, and holds licences to export F-35 fighter jet components which are used by Israel.

Yet in 2024, RTX faced significant legal sanctions in the US relating to alleged bribery of foreign officials, defective pricing, and export control violations.

The company settled several federal investigations with overall penalties exceeding $950 million.

Crucially, Freedom of Information requests suggest that UK export-licensing authorities have taken no action in response to these developments.

The Department for Business and Trade and the Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU) said in October 2025 they hold no internal correspondence, briefs, or risk assessments relating to the RTX enforcement actions.

This is despite the UK’s own guidelines for military export licences explicitly requiring ongoing assessment of risk of diversion, misuse, and breach of international humanitarian law.

The guidelines also direct authorities to consider exporter conduct and compliance history.

In response to further FOI requests, the Ministry of Defence also refused to clarify whether RTX’s enforcement actions abroad were internally discussed when deliberating the award of major contracts to the company.

This apparent inaction raises fundamental questions about whether systemic reassessment of exporter behaviour takes place when serious misconduct comes to light.

It also comes as the UK’s National Audit Office has found in a new report released last week that the defence ministry could “make significant savings” if it better managed losses from economic crimes, including procurement fraud.

The business and trade department and defence ministry did not respond to requests for comment about whether they consider foreign corruption scandals when awarding export licences or training contracts to firms.

Raytheon has been the subject of past enforcement controversies in Britain, with the company refusing to explain its activities to the government’s committees on arms export control in 2019 while arming Saudi Arabia’s brutal war on Yemen.

Its competitor for the army training contract, Elbit Systems, is also facing accusations of breaching business appointment rules while continuing to hold export licences granted by the ECJU.

Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) spokesperson Emily Apple told Declassified: “Time and again successive governments have lied, repeatedly telling us the UK has one of the most robust arms export control systems in the world. Nothing could be further from the truth”.

The business and trade department said: “The UK operates one of the most robust and transparent export control regimes in the world.

“All export licensing decisions are made in line with our Strategic Export Licensing Criteria, and our assessments take all information relevant to the risk of diversion or misuse into account”.

Moog

The issue is not unique to RTX.

Another defence contractor, Moog Inc., resolved a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) administrative order in October 2024 involving bribery by its Indian subsidiary.

The FCPA is a US federal law which makes it illegal for US persons or companies to bribe foreign government officials to gain a business advantage.

However, the ECJU also holds “no information” about any discussions relating to that FCPA order, according to the FOI documents seen by Declassified.

Together, the RTX and Moog cases represent the only publicly reported defence industry FCPA-related enforcement actions in 2024.

Moog currently holds UK licenses to export components for trainer aircraft used by the Israeli air force, and contributes to the global F-35 programme.

Public information raises further questions about how Moog’s compliance oversight function was structured during the period in which these violations allegedly occurred.

According to a LinkedIn profile, Moog’s compliance manager has had oversight of both Moog UK and Moog India since before 2020 — the period during which the company’s Indian subsidiary was later found by US authorities to have engaged in bribery of state officials.

“While the existence of a group-level compliance function does not itself imply wrongdoing, it underscores that Moog’s UK operations were not operating in isolation from wider corporate compliance arrangements at the time, and raises legitimate questions about how compliance risks were identified, escalated, and addressed across the group”, said Emily Apple from CAAT.

Despite these questions, Moog Wolverhampton has not been subject to an ECJU compliance visit since 2022, according to further FOI requests issued in November.

This is notable given that the site was inspected twice within a two-month period that year, a pattern potentially associated with follow-up or remedial reviews.

Yet the company’s sites in Britain have apparently not been revisited in the three years since, including after Moog’s US parent company agreed a major FCPA settlement in 2024.

Emily Apple added: “Whether it’s ignoring corruption scandals, or trampling over international law, it appears there are no limits to the steps the government is prepared to take to prioritise arms dealers’ profits. This is a system beyond reform. It is out of control, devoid of ethics and operating beyond the law”.

Moog and RTX did not respond to requests for comment.