Too big to comprehend !
The BAe management of the Nimrod project is almost too big and complicated to fully understand and it is complicated by other party's inputs, but at the end of the day it was the attitude that the govenment had an unlimited ability to fund the project that resulted BAe thinking they could get away with anything.
Much smaller was the Buldog life extension program, it was quite clear to see that with the price quoted for the work BAe was under the misaprihention that they could charge sky high prices for a comparitvly simple job, I don't think this was coruption so much as institutional torpa and incompetence ......... Fortunatly the simplicity of the job resulted in the govenment getting wise and not giving BAe the contract.
Their are a lot of fine people working for BAe but collectively they don't work well within that system and BAe as a company has proved itself unfit to run any big contract at a reasonable price.
The idea that BAe should in any way be involved in any future large aviation project should be resisted otherwise we will have a rerun of the two Nimrod failures.