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Figures registered in the U.K.'s Register of Members have outlined that 13 Members of parliament from the ruling Conservative Party have received in excess of some US$133,300 in hospitality perks from Saudi Arabia.
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The revelation, according to Middle East Eye, has prompted grave concern with the parliament's standards watchdog suggesting that lawmakers are in direct breach of financial interests and that Riyadh is using the MPs to boost their reputation amid concerns over their war in Yemen.
It has been reported that Leo Docherty, an influential former chair of the Conservative Middle East Council, as well as Labour MP Liam Byrne, both received donations as part of the Saudi government's lobby to U.K. officials in 2017 alone.
The hospitality payouts came in the form of business-class flights, luxury hotels, fine dining and meetings with King Salman and other senior officials courtesy of Riyadh. This year's tally, according to the Register of Members, represents a threefold bump in respect to Saudi Arabia's 2016 hospitality spending.
“It's bad enough seeing the government's constant failure to condemn Saudi Arabia's appalling human rights record, but now we're seeing a growing band of Tory MPs enjoying free trips courtesy of the Saudi regime,” said Liberal Democratic MP Tom Brake.
Of the news, Conservative MP and former Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell went even further, chastising the British government for its “shameful complicity” in Saudi Arabia's protracted war against the people of Yemen, which has caused “famine” and “collective punishment."
He went on to state that the Saudi-led war in Yemen, financed and backed by the U.K., which has up to 50 British military personnel training soldiers who'll be deployed to fight in Yemen, according to The Mail on Sunday, includes “breaches of the Geneva Conventions.”
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Earlier this month, the Campaign Against Arms Trade reported that British arms sales to Saudi Arabia have jumped by over 450 percent.
CAAT data showed that the U.K. has sent nearly US$6.2 billion in arms exports to the kingdom since the start of the war on Yemen in March 2015: a 457 percent increase compared to the period from January 2008 to April 2015, during which about US$7.8 billion dollars worth of weapons were exported.
Amid the war — which has claimed the lives of at least 10,000 Yemenis and left some 40,000 injured, and is being waged amid a mass cholera outbreak infecting nearly 900,000 people — Wolfgang Jamann, head of the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief, a non-governmental humanitarian agency, has affirmed that the current crisis in Yemen is an absolute “shame on humanity.”
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