Chapter two in a cover-up

Pre-tax profits for the full year were £2.37 billion, up 91 per cent from 2007. Sales were up 18 per cent on the previous year, while orders rose 20 per cent.

Which is probably just as well for the firm, since it means that the almost £300 million in penalties that it will now have to pay after admitting charges of false accounting and making misleading statements is easily affordable and won't even make a dent in the kitty.

This happy conclusion may please the firm, but it won't be appreciated by the Afghans and Iraqis who are on the receiving end of the firm's output.

The massive penalties are the result of the long-running saga of corruption investigations by the US authorities into the BAE manner of doing business.

However, BAE will not face international blacklisting from future contracts, because it has only admitted false accounting, not bribery.

And that should please at least three people, ex-prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, along with ex-attorney general Lord Goldsmith.

Mrs Thatcher because the al-Yamamah deal, which lies at the centre of many of the allegations against BAE, was her baby, one that she bragged about publicly, lauding it as the biggest-ever arms contract.

Mr Blair and his mate Lord Goldsmith because it was their actions which closed down Britain's Serious Fraud Office investigation into al-Yamamah "in the national interest," actions which were furiously contested at the time and continue to be controversial.

Lord Goldsmith went on record at the weekend defending the deal that BAE made with US prosecutors and the SFO over al-Yamamah and the obscene Tanzanian business - in which BAE flogged an out-of-date military radar system to a country which didn't even have an air force - as a fine example of plea bargaining, "one of the things," he said happily, "that we are learning from the US."

Lord Goldsmith might more truthfully have said that this "plea bargain" has succeeded in terminating any further investigation into this disgraceful episode.

It has, as BAE chairman Dick Olver said, assisted the firm to draw a "very heavy line" under corruption claims made against it.

But this cannot, and should not, be allowed to happen if justice is to be served.

As Campaign Against Arms Trade has said, it means there is "no opportunity to discover the truth" about the firm's bribery and corruption allegations.

Mr Blair must be breathing a sigh of relief. He must be praying that the scandal of government collusion with big business in suppressing allegations of corruption and multimillion-pound payoffs in the name of preserving Saudi Arabia's co-operation in the "war against terror" will now go away.

He couldn't be more wrong. This blatant cover-up will not vanish and will return to haunt a government that blatantly colluded with the arms dealers.

Lord Goldsmith's advocacy of plea bargaining is no more than a defence of extending the cover-up yet further, to protect an immoral trade in arms conducted by bribery and fat payoffs, resulting in fat profits for the arms dealers and back-door millions for corrupt politicians.

Such deals have flooded unstable areas of the globe with arms, the very presence of which has destabilised the situation even further.

Any quasi-legal process which aids in the concealment of government acquiescence or, worse, involvement, in such dealings must work against the interests of justice and, ultimately, against the cause of peace in a world plagued with continuous war.

Arms dealers are parasites living off this instability and the task of governments is to work for their elimination, not to collude in their impunity.