Jeffrey Cook, a former Ministry of Defence official, has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for misconduct in public office.
The conviction follows an investigation that revealed Cook received £70,000 in illicit payments and gifts in relation to public contracts he managed.
The London Southwark Crown Court heard that the payments included £44,000 in cash and two cars valued at £30,000.
The Serious Fraud Office detailed that between 2005 and 2006, while overseeing his department’s finances, Cook arranged for ME Consultants Limited to create reports for the Ministry of Defence’s SANGCOM project, which involved supplying military communications equipment to the Saudi Arabian National Guard.
The firm, which had a Swiss bank account, received £702,800 from the MoD for these reports.
During this period, Ministry of Defence rules expressly prohibited employees from accepting any form of external paid employment. However, Cook, who was also seconded to the defence contractor Paradigm, received multiple payments that included cash deposits into his and his wife’s Barclays bank account from early 2006 to mid-2007.
The court was told that the 67-year-old from Ceredigion had used his official position to commission these reports from an offshore consultancy firm where he had personal contacts, thus breaching the trust placed in him by the Ministry. Cook’s illicit gains totalled over £70,000 in cash and valuable assets, prompting the 30-month prison sentence upon conviction.
Corrupt behaviour by Crown servants is fortunately very rare, no matter what some UKDJ contributors have suggested in the past.