Stunning victory for MoS foreign aid campaign as FOUR fat cats have to quit
FOUR senior executives at Britain’s biggest specialist foreign aid contractor have quit after explosive disclosures in The Mail on Sunday of dirty tricks and profiteering.
The astonishing clearout of four founding directors at Adam Smith International (ASI) comes after this newspaper revealed how the firm obtained secret Government documents and used them to their advantage in bids for contracts.
Leaked emails also exposed how ASI attempted to dupe MPs by passing faked evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into private- sector fat cats. The inquiry was set up after previous exposés in this newspaper of excessive pay and profits in the aid industry.
The resignations at the shamed company come after furious Ministers and MPs on the International Development Committee (IDC) set up their own inquiries that endorsed our investigations. ASI – which has former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind on its board – is stopping bids for new Department for International Development (DFID) work while it cleans up its act and changes its structure. Government sources claim the moves could cost the firm £150million in lost business.
ASI used aggressive tactics and a network of well-placed contacts to dominate the sector, winning aid deals for projects from Afghanistan to southern Africa worth nearly £300million over the past three years alone.
Its turnover and profits have almost trebled since 2010, enabling its top team to pocket millions as aid spending boomed. Nearly all of its income comes from British taxpayers.
DFID said it welcomed ASI’s suspension of bidding while sorting out ‘fundamental’ problems.
A statement said there were ‘serious questions over ethical integrity’ that ‘will not be solved with quick fixes’.
The Foreign Office is also concerned by ASI’s actions. ‘We are working closely with DFID and looking at how this impacts with them working with us in the future,’ said a source. ‘We must ensure any bidders meet the highest standards.’
Other Government sources admit they were surprised to discover they can take no action against Raja Dasgupta, the former DFID official who circulated the confidential documents soon after joining ASI in a senior role. ‘It’s frustrating there is not more we can do,’ a source said.
The directors leaving ASI and all associated companies are Peter Young, the strategy chief who oversaw the duping of the parliamentary inquiry, and fellow founders Andrew Kuhn and Amitabh Shrivastava.
Executive chairman William Morrison will also quit after restructuring the firm. He said: ‘We regret that certain deficiencies of policy and procedure resulted in our failure to meet the highest standards of corporate governance.’
It is believed nine other senior ASI executives who received the documents in an email from Dasgupta
‘This dysfunctional firm is just the tip of the iceberg’
remain in post, despite DFID’s strong public condemnation of their failure to raise concerns. The firm’s spokeswoman said an internal disciplinary review was under way.
The ambitious outfit remains highly active around the world, with a new office in Tunisia and a source in East Africa saying ASI was still ‘fishing’ for lucrative aid contracts.
Ministers are reviewing procurement policies after the scandal, seeking to open up contracts to smaller firms and extend transparency over how taxpayers’ cash is spent.
MPs have urged them to get a grip on the poverty sector. Tory MP Nigel Evans, a member of the IDC, said: ‘My fear is this dysfunctional company is just the tip of the iceberg. Alarm bells should be ringing loudly.’