Gordon Foxley

Gordon Foxley was the Director of Ammunition Procurement at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence from 1981 to 1984. He was convicted on 12 counts of corruption in 1993 after he took bribes from arms manufacturers to set up defence contracts. A 1995 MoD report "Ministry of Defence: Fraud in Defence Procurement" concludes that Gordon Foxley's case is one of the worst cases of corruption that has come before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). The exact amount received is not clear, but the National Audit Office report shows that his English bank account received credits to the tune of £3.5 million between 1982 and 1990, but most of it could not be accounted for after his son Paul burnt the records. Paul was jailed for six months for this.

A 1994 estimate of the total cost of his corruption included almost £30 million in losses to a Blackburn factory that could have won the contract, including the loss of hundreds of jobs. Jack Dromey, then deputy general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, called him "an obscene product of his times". In fact MP Mike Hall was erroneous in his statement and it transpired that Captain Foxley had passed a humorous note to his father which was found during the search of Foxley's home office, but because it was written on an MoD memorandum sheet, and because Captain Foxley had been aide-de-camp (ADC) to the Master-General of the Ordnance, it was assumed that he had been passing inside commercial information to his father. Note: An ADC is an administrative appointment filled by a junior officer to relieve a senior officer of the burden of arranging social / administrative arrangements. A Military Assistant (MA) assists with operational matters. An Army Board of Inquiry cleared Captain Foxley of these accusations, and he subsequently went on to serve with distinction on active service, sustaining wounds on operations in Northern Ireland.

European Court of Human Rights victory On 21 June 2000, Gordon Foxley, then 75, won a case against the Government at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The Government was ordered to pay £6,000 in costs and expenses to Mr Foxley for violating article eight of the Convention on Human Rights when 71 of Foxley's letters were opened and copied by a bankruptcy trustee, including letters from Mr Foxley's legal advisers. Foxley's mail and other communications were 'intercepted' during the investigation—although details were not made public, and a copy of the Home Office order authorising such actions has never been admitted or made public. However, an investigation into the actions of the MoD Police and supporting Government agencies in intercepting his communications and those of the other members of his family was conducted by the Police Complaints Authority in 1989 and declared to be of 'operational interest' and thus not for public exposure at the time. A county court had granted permission for all Foxley's post to be redirected to the bankruptcy trustee for three months, so his assets and creditors could be determined; however, the government exceeded the 3-month period.

Son Lt Colonel Ian Foxley

In December 2010, another of Gordon Foxley's sons, Lieutenant Colonel Ian Foxley, made allegations of corruption against the Executive Directors of GPT Special Project Management Ltd, a subsidiary of the Airbus Group, with the Saudi Arabian National Guard Communications (SANGCOM) Project for which he was the Programme Director. Ian Foxley further alleged that the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) and United Kingdom Trade and Investment Defence Security Organisation (UKTI DSO), which processed the payments to accounts in the Cayman Islands through an MoD bank account with HSBC, could not have been unaware of the dubious nature of these payments. On 7 August 2012, the Director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) initiated a criminal investigation. Private Eye independently investigated the allegations and found a history of payments from SANGCOM Prime Contractors to a succession of offshore accounts since the beginning of the project in 1978. The Private Eye special report (Private Eye Issue 1375) 'Shady Arabia and the Desert Fix' was joint winner of the Paul Foot Award for Investigative Journalism in 2015. In November 2023 two men connected to the affair accused of authorising corrupt payments amounting to £9.7m to senior Saudis between 2007 and 2012 were prosecuted at Southwark crown court.

Media In 1995, Modern Times: Open Prison, documented Foxley's genteel conditions in Ford Open Prison.