When Ian Foxley found evidence of corruption while working at a British company in Riyadh, he alerted the MoD. He didn’t know he’d stumbled upon one of its most closely guarded secrets
Three days before he fled Saudi Arabia, Ian Foxley was summoned to his boss’s office on the 22nd floor of a Riyadh skyscraper and told to either resign or be sacked. He had been in the job for just six months and it was clear to him that something in the organisation was badly wrong – but he did not suspect that he would soon be in fear of his life.
It was in May 2010, while reading the Sunday Times at home in a village near York, that Foxley had spotted the job advert. A company was looking for someone to oversee the expansion of a British army programme in Saudi Arabia called Sangcom. Worth 150m when first agreed in 1978, the programme had grown into a 2bn deal for the UK government to supply the Saudi Arabian national guard with everything from encrypted radios to satellite communications and fibre optics.
Foxley hadn’t heard of Sangcom, but it was well known among graduates of the Royal corps of Signals, the British army specialist communications division, where Foxley had been a lieutenant colonel. In theory, Sangcom was run by a few dozen UK Ministry of Defence specialists in Riyadh; in practice, the programme was almost entirely managed by GPT Special Project Management, a contractor hired by the British government. As and when the Saudis wanted to upgrade their military...
[OSEN=Jang Woo-young, reporter] Singer Soyou and actor Lee Yi-kyung have faced sudden rumors. Hiding behind the mask of anonymity, the rumors angered Soyou, while Lee Yi-kyung has declared legal a...