"Am I suggesting, as a journo, that it is not for the newspapers and journo's in our democracy to point out to the correct authorities cases of illegal activity, corruption etc etc?"
No. That's not what I'm suggesting. What I'm suggesting is that the authorities should look carefully at what they are given, and by whom, before wasting public money on pointless, massively expensive, potentially damaging investigations.
There's a difference between guardians of public morality reporting genuine cases of illegal activity, and $hit-stirring weasels cynically using information of dubious provenance (and gathered using deplorably underhand tactics) to try to achieve political aims......
If you have some detailed inside track at the SFO whereby you can back that up then I defer to your knowledge but I seriously doubt it - you are guessing from your own dealings with BAE that they are clean. Just because you don't have any evidence doesn't fill me with a warm glow that BAE are squeaky. The only ones in this mess who actually have no axe to grind are the SFO and the Judiciary.
A number of people who I trust, from a number of organisations and agencies, assure me that BAE and HMG are pretty clean on this one - and that they were certainly cleaner than any of our competitors were at the time. I would not want anyone to have crossed the line and used outright bribery to win an order, but nor would I want them to operate to standards that the rest of the aerospace industry could not or would not operate. Shocking as it might seem, I'm relaxed if HMG fought for orders as hard as the Yanks would have done, though I'd disapprove if they came out with the "buy aircraft X because that will be a token of our alliance in the war against terror, you're either for against us" line.
I would not say that the SFO and the Judiciary had "no axe to grind."
The SFO have had more than enough time to put up or shut up, and have done neither.
For our own interests (and not in order to placate the Saudis) we should choose to waste no more money on this flawed process.
1) No evidence has been produced (and what anecdotal evidence there is suggests that there is no case to answer).
2) This all happened 20 years ago. And it threatens UK jobs today.
3) There is NO EVIDENCE that BAE did anything wrong, and yet people like you are still harping on and on about corruption, tarnishing the company's reputation and damaging the UK and its interests.
Again, quoting the report (and I note that the Guardian studiously avoid this)
"According to the Attorney General's evidence, BAE has always contended that any payments it made were approved by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In short they were lawful commissions and not secret payments made without the consent or approval of the principal. The cause of anti-corruption is not served by pursuing investigations which fail to distinguish between a commission and a bribe. It would be unfair to BAE to assume that there was a realistic possibility, let alone a probability, of proving that it was guilty of any criminal offence."