AN MP has criticised the Foreign Office for allowing thieves who stole a pair of satellite phones in Iraq to run up a bill of over £590,000 by calling premium rate lines.

Richard Bacon, Conservative MP for South Norfolk and a member of the Commons public accounts committee, has written to Sir Michael Jay, permanent under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office and head of the diplomatic service, asking for a progress report in an investigation into who used the stolen satellite phones.

Mr Bacon’s letter follows recent evidence to the public accounts committee by Sir Michael Jay, who admitted that the bills for two stolen satellite phones totalling £594,000 over a period of 17 months were paid by the Foreign Office without being queried.

This was despite the fact that all the pattern of usage of the phones pointed to criminal activity. The satellite phones were used to call premium rate lines, and in one case there was a bill of £212,000 for one phone for one month’s bill.

Sir Michael Jay told the committee that the Foreign Office did not know who had set up the premium rate lines, although he believed it was the person who had stolen the phones.

Sir Michael said:

“There are rather complicated circumstances in which you could, as was the case as we understand it here, have a phone on virtually full time with the person who is, at it were, making the call getting some benefit from it.  That is as we understand it and I cannot claim that I completely understand the system, but one of these phones at least seems to have been on almost all the time to a number in the Wallis and Futuna Islands which are very small and unknown French dependencies in the Pacific and we do not know why”.

The full transcript can be viewed here.

Mr Bacon said:

“The setting up of premium rate lines by the thieves is in effect a form of money laundering, paid for by the Foreign Office using taxpayers’ money. It is simply extraordinary that the person in the Foreign Office responsible for paying such huge phone bills didn’t ask what was going on. It is equally amazing that with all the resources of the intelligence community and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the Foreign Office has still not figured out who pulled this scam. We need to know that this has been cleared up and that it couldn’t happen again”.

1 March 2006

See also:
TRANSCRIPT: Sir Michael's uncorrected evidence to the PAC

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