A Saudi prince who negotiated a £40bn arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia received secret payments for over a decade, a BBC probe has found.
The UK's biggest arms dealer, BAE Systems, paid hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
The payments were made with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence.
Prince Bandar "categorically" denied receiving any improper payments and BAE said it acted lawfully at all times.
According to Panorama's sources, the payments were written into the arms deal contract in secret annexes, described as "support services".
They were authorised on a quarterly basis by the MoD.
It remains unclear whether the payments were actually illegal - a point which depends in part on whether they continued after 2001, when the UK made bribery of foreign officials an offence.
The payments were discovered during a Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation.
The SFO inquiry into the Al Yamamah deal was stopped in December 2006 by attorney general Lord Goldsmith.
Here is a post which has an article about the stopped SFO investigation.
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