Page 26 - bne IntelliNews Georgia country report November 2017

Eurasia
November 11, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 26
any connection to the missile attack. “The Saudis, who have failed to achieve their evil goals during the long-term military aggression against Yemen, are making more problems for their defeated coalition with a clumsy psychological operation to make baseless and false accusations,” he said on November 6.
“Our friendly advice to them is to stop playing the blame game and levelling accusations against others, and rather halt their attacks on the inno- cent and defenceless people of Yemen as soon as possible, and pave the way for Yemeni-Yemeni dia- logue and peace-making in that country,” Tasnim News Agency also quoted him as saying.
The Associated Press reported the Houthis as stating the missile launch was in reaction to
US charges five for bribing officials to win Central Asia contracts for Rolls-Royce
bne IntelliNews
The US Justice Department on November 7 un- veiled charges against five individuals who al- legedly participated in a scheme to pay bribes to foreign government officials – including some in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan – to benefit an Ameri- can subsidiary of Rolls-Royce Holdings.
Officials at state-run energy companies from
the two CIS countries as well as Thailand, Bra- zil, Angola and Iraq supposedly received a total
of $35mn from the British multinational public limited engineering company, the second largest maker of aircraft engines, between 1999 and 2013.
Saudi-led bombings in Yemen that have killed thousands of civilians in the course of the war. The Houthis have previously fired missiles across the border, but the latest missile ventured further into Saudi territory than any previous one.
Trump, while in Japan on an official visit, praised the Saudi missile defences, saying they “took the missile right out of the air. Blew it up”. The White House said that in a phone call to Saudi King Salman the president had re-emphasised his support for Saudi purchases of American military equipment to keep the kingdom safe.
Saudi Arabia and Iran have been fighting proxy wars in Syria and Yemen since 2015 in the fight for influence over the shape of the Middle East.
The eagle-eyed US Justice Department has been busy investigating corrupt payments as far afield as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
Four of the five people who were charged have since pleaded guilty.
The individuals charged by the justice department are Petros Contoguris, 70, who served as the founder and chief executive of a Turkish oil and gas company advisory firm called Gravitas & Cie. International; Keith Barnett, a former Rolls-Royce regional energy director in the US; James Finley, a former senior executive in Rolls-Royce's energy sales division; Aloysius Johannes Jozef Zuurhout, an ex-employee for a Dutch subsidiary of Rolls- Royce; and Andreas Kohler, an employee in the