Secret government files about the dealings between the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s son Sir Mark Thatcher and the Sultan of Oman have been withheld from a thick batch of historic documents released in the UK this week.
Files listed as ‘Prime Minister: Cementation contract: Mark Thatcher and the Omanis’, Prime Minister: Mark Thatcher and the Omanis: other allegations against Mark Thatcher’, and Prime Minister: Request by electronic data system to employ Mark Thatcher’, dating to the 1980s, have all been retained, according to The Guardian.
The Downing Street decision was condemned as ludicrous, according to The Times.
The papers concern his dealings with Oman, which caused a scandal for his mother when she was prime minister and led to him being effectively exiled from Britain.
The decision not to release the documents more than 20 years after they were written comes despite prime ministerial promises to lower the threshold for the restriction of the publication of historic documents, which are now typically released annually to the National Archives after 20 years.
In 1984 it was alleged that Mrs Thatcher had used her influence with Sultan Qaboos of Oman to secure a contract to build a new university in Oman for Cementation International, a Trafalgar House subsidiary for which Sir Mark was working as a secret consultant.
The Times said one of the files, “Cementation contract: Mark Thatcher and the Omanis”, is listed as being retained for 65 years, meaning that they will not be released until 2053.
Two other files, one of them entitled “Mark Thatcher and the Omanis; other allegations against Mark Thatcher”, have been marked “temporarily retained” with no date for release.
Mark Hollingsworth, Mark Thatcher’s biographer, told The Times the files may have been retained because they include information about Sir Mark’s role in the Al Yamamah deal with Saudi Arabia, the biggest arms deal in British history. Later it was alleged that Sir Mark received up to $16 million in commissions for his role in the Al Yamamah arms-for-oil deal with Saudi Arabia, signed in 1985.
According to a biography on the leader affectionately called the Iron Lady, released in October last year, Mark Thatcher was in effect exiled from Britain after being repeatedly warned that he was damaging his mother’s reputation over his oil dealings with the Sultan of Oman.
Senior advisors to Mrs Thatcher, who was prime minister1979 to 1990, believed her son’s business dealings were “driven by greed” and his mother’s attitude towards them “conveyed a whiff of corruption”, according to The Guardian.
Her principal private secretary Sir Clive Whitmore said, “Mark was driven by greed and reluctant to pass up any opportunity,” according to the biography.
Another of her private secretaries, Robin Butler, who served in 1984, claimed that competing bidders for a Cementation construction deal in Oman had complained that Mrs Thatcher used her influence with the Sultan of Oman to help the company that Mark was working for win the contract.
Butler said: “He thought that Mrs Thatcher’s behaviour in Oman had conveyed a whiff of corruption, though she might not have regarded it as such. She had wanted to see Mark right. She sought the deal for Mark. She excluded everyone from her talks with the Sultan. Mark was dealing with Brigadier Landon, who was the Sultan’s go-between. She behaved in the most peculiar way. I suspected the worst.”
Hollingsworth told The Times that because the files mentioned “other allegations”, they could include references to the Saudi deal. He added that the decision was designed to suppress Sir Mark’s alleged involvement in the Al Yamamah arms deal.
“There is no justification for retaining the file for a government-to-government contract which was completed over 30 years ago. It has nothing to do with private data but all to do with not upsetting the Saudi royal family.”
Sir Mark was convicted in South Africa in 2005 and given a four-year suspended jail sentence for his part in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea.
He is believed to be living in Marbella, Spain.
Other sensitive historic documents also retained by Downing Street include some royal and security files; the proceedings of the Profumo inquiry; the Peter Wright “Spycatcher” case; most defence records; Anglo-Irish negotiations; and Soviet relations.
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