The dogged pursuit of General Pinochet's multimillion dollar fortune by a Chilean judge, Sergio Muñoz, culminated last month in the arrest of Pinochet's wife and son in Santiago. The hunt has unearthed a sophisticated array of bank accounts and offshore hiding places. It has also left Britain's biggest arms company, BAE, facing many questions in what may prove one of the biggest scandals to hit an already scandal-prone company.
The Chilean legal documents, based on US banking records, list secret payments by BAE to what are said to be front companies and middlemen for Gen Pinochet. They total $2,098,841 (more than £1m). The payments began in 1997, and the latest were recorded last year. A final $189,940 payment went into an alleged front company on June 30 last year.
Many of the recent payments were not recorded in the name of BAE, but in that of Red Diamond Trading, an entity registered in the financial "black hole" of the British Virgin Islands. The company was set up in 1998 by a discreet subdivision of BAE at its Farnborough HQ. It has the uninformative title of HQ Marketing Services.
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