Word: mailings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sales: $4.9 billion) had to seek government assistance to keep it going; in 1975 the British government spent millions to buy 95% of the company's stock and rescue it from bankruptcy. Also like the American firm, British Leyland depends heavily on its export business. The Daily Mail charged that the firm has been "paying bribes and conspiring to defraud foreign governments on a massive scale in a desperate effort to win overseas orders...
British Leyland's "slushing," as the Daily Mail told it, amounted to $19.4 million in the 1975-76 financial year and is estimated at $42.5 million for 1977-78. Furthermore, the paper claimed to have evidence that these payments were authorized by a Cabinet member, Industry Secretary Eric Varley...
...Daily Mail's evidence seemed highly questionable. One item was a photostat of a letter that the paper said had been sent by Lord Ryder, who as chairman of the National Enterprise Board oversees companies in which the government owns shares, to British Leyland Chief Executive Alex Park. The letter spoke of a "proposed method for dealing with 'special account arrangements' " that had been "nodded through" by Varley. The note went on to mention Ryder's concern about "the escalating trend of payment to 'contract agents,' " especially in the Middle East, and included...
...connected with overseas payoffs. A British Leyland financial executive named Graham Barton later admitted that he had forged the Ryder letter. But he insisted that he had done so only to emphasize "what I regarded as a national scandal," and maintained that other documents cited in the Daily Mail story were genuine...
...separate inquiry. In any case, the discovery of some noncontract payments abroad would hardly come as a surprise. Sir Fred Catherwood, chairman of the British Overseas Trade Board, candidly admitted last week that "in one-third of our markets, bribery is a way of life." Nonetheless, the Daily Mail's story could hardly have come at a more awkward time. Only two weeks ago, at the London summit, British officials joined representatives from the U.S. and other countries in solemnly pledging to help stamp out the very practices with which British Leyland is charged...