Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Marise Payne mishandled information provided by a whistleblower: Payne's dealings with the French embassy require investigation

by Ganesh Sahathevan

The Defence Minister Marise Payne has no right whatsoever to hand over ,especially to a foreign government,  information brought to her attention by anyone claiming whistle-blower protection: 

Payne told The Australian yesterday she did not access the data drive and had no way to verify its contents. “I conveyed the drive to the secretary of my department. The drive was provided to a senior official at the French embassy, given its purported contents were the property of French company DCNS.”

In her own words, she handed over to the French a USB that could have contained anything, including classified Australian Government information.Even if it was not classified, there was no telling what there was on that USB that might be useful to the French in their dealings with Australia.Then, she assumed the French were the rightful owners, based on what she felt were "its purported contents".

Information coming into the possession of the Government Of Australia must be properly  analyzed,and its relevance to the interests of Australia properly determined. The Australian Government is not an arm of the French or any other government.Its only interest is that of the Australian people.
This familiarity with DCNS and the French Government is disturbing, to say the least, in any Asian country Payne would have long since been sacked. 




Navigating the submarine leaks scandal: the story behind a scoop

Rex Patrick, a former navy submariner, left his former role as a training officer for foreign navies to join Nick Xenophon as an adviser early this year.
On August 29, independent senator Nick Xenophon walked into the office of Defence Minister Marise Payne and handed her a data stick containing the stolen secrets of India’s new submarine fleet.
Xenophon also told her that the person behind the explosive story in The Australian five days earlier — which revealed the leak of 22,400 pages of secret data on the French-designed Indian fleet — was his own senior adviser Rex Patrick.
The senator told Payne that the actions of Patrick, a former submariner, were those of a whistleblower who had acted in Australia’s national interest by helping to protect the integrity of the $50 billion future submarine project.
Then came an unexpected twist. Xenophon told the Defence Minister that in 2013, Patrick had shown a part of the confidential leaked data to Defence’s most senior submariner, Rear Admiral Greg Sammut, but nothing had come of it.
Sammut says he passed the information on to Defence Intelligence, who never followed it up with him.
It was an astonishing claim in a story that already had become a global scandal and front-page news in France and India.
This was just one in a series of remarkable backroom developments in the submarine leaks controversy that The Australian can now reveal. They have embroiled navy top brass, the Turnbull cabinet, diplomats and spies as investigators in three countries try to contain the damage and ­apportion blame for the massive international security leak.
Now Patrick, who has agreed to speak about his role for the first time, has told of his meeting with Sammut and his decision to become a whistleblower.
Patrick received the data stick containing the 22,400 leaked files by accident in April 2013 after the data had been stolen from DCNS by a former subcontractor in 2011 and had made its way from France to Southeast Asia and on to Sydney.
The 49-year-old Patrick left his former role as a training officer for foreign navies to join Xenophon as an adviser early this year. He says that after he sat on the leaked submarine documents for more than three years, it was time to make public the fact that the French company that will design Australia’s new submarine fleet had suffered a catastrophic criminal leak of confidential data on its Indian submarine project in 2011.
“It was time to get the issue out into the open. It alerted Australian taxpayers to the problem … they have a right to know that the problem exists, that they (the government) need to work with France to solve,” he says.
At first the government was furious when it learned of Xenophon’s role in sanctioning Patrick’s decision to disclose the leak to this newspaper. The public revelation was hugely embarrassing for Australia, France and India.
It was a black eye for the global reputation of French shipbuilder DCNS, in which the Turnbull government had invested heavily by announcing it as the winner of the competition to design Australia’s new submarine fleet.
In the eyes of the government, the South Australian senator had sanctioned a leak that had harmed the reputation of DCNS and, by extension, Australia’s ­future submarine project.
Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne did not accept Xenophon and Patrick’s argument that the disclosure was in the public interest because it would prompt France and Australia to redouble efforts to prevent a similar leak on the Australian submarine project.
Pyne was furious at his South Australian political rival and said publicly that whoever leaked the story could not be classified as a whistleblower.
Yet Pyne and Payne knew within hours of The Australian breaking the story on August 24 that Xenophon was linked to the leak.
That morning, Xenophon had called Payne’s office to confess his and Patrick’s role in the story, but the minister was travelling overseas so he told a staffer he would tell Payne the full story when she returned. Once Xenophon confessed Patrick’s identify to Payne, it became an open secret in government and Defence circles.
Soon after The Australian revealed news of the leak, Sammut, as head of the Future Submarine Project, told Defence secretary Dennis Richardson and Payne of his brief discussion with Patrick three years earlier.
Sammut, who then was a commodore in charge of submarine capability, is one of the most respected officers in Defence. At that time, there was no competition for the future submarine and DCNS was not a contender.
Patrick and Sammut give different versions of their meeting on that day. Patrick says he approached Sammut in the waiting room of a Defence estimates hearing in May 2013 with the leaked Scorpene data.
“I put a USB stick into my computer and presented the front screen of the Scorpene datafile to Greg,” says Patrick.
“I then told him how the data came into my possession and took him through a couple of pages of the disk.”
Patrick says he made the significance of the data clear to Sammut. “I offered to surrender the disk to him but required an undertaking that my name, as the source of the disk, not be provided to anyone,” he says. “He told me he was not sure he could do that and would have to seek advice.”
Sammut disputes Patrick’s version of events and says he was not made aware of the significance of the data during their short discussion. “I did not view the information regarding a Scorpene submarine Mr Patrick claimed to hold in any detail,” Sammut said in a statement last night. “I did see one page of indeterminate material on his computer screen. He did not indicate that this information concerned India’s Scorpenes.”
Sammut said he reported this encounter to the then deputy ­director of intelligence and sec­urity and it was agreed that the Defence Intelligence Organisation would take up the matter.
Patrick says the DIO did not make contact with him and as far as he is aware, nothing further happened.
Yet the decision by Xenophon and Patrick in August to surrender the stolen DCNS data file to Payne created a dilemma for the government, which had to decide what to do with 22,400 pages of highly sensitive data on the submarine fleet of a major regional power.
Payne told The Australian yesterday she did not access the data drive and had no way to verify its contents. “I conveyed the drive to the secretary of my department. The drive was provided to a senior official at the French embassy, given its purported contents were the property of French company DCNS.”
France is believed to have provided a copy to the Indian government, although the Indian high commission in Canberra could not confirm this yesterday.
Investigators in both countries are trying to gauge the extent of the damage that may have been caused if the leaked data were ­accessed by a foreign power.
French public prosecutors and French intelligence agencies are also tracking down a French ­former DCNS subcontractor who was also a former French naval officer and who is believed to have stolen the data from DCNS and taken it to Malaysia for use in a naval training course.
The former officer lost control of that data when he was sacked and locked out of his workplace with the data still on his work computer inside the building. That company placed the data — apparently thinking that it was routine naval training data — on an internet server before posting it by regular mail to ­Patrick at a Sydney post office box address.
The Australian understands French prosecutors have identified the former employee who stole the data and are building a prosecution case against him.
DCNS is also aware of Patrick and Xenophon’s role in disclosing the leak to The Australian.
Yet despite knowing this, DCNS reportedly believes its rival German submarine bidder, TKMS, is behind the story.
The company’s global head, Herve Guillou, called the leak “economic warfare” and The Australianunderstands the French government has formally complained to Berlin about Germany’s alleged role.
TKMS is angered by the implication and anxious to refute it, fearing it could damage its own reputation and place at risk lucrative defence contracts.
Late last month, TKMS quietly dispatched two investigators to Australia to examine if any of its Australian employees played a role in the leak story.
The company is expected to soon tell the French government it has found no evidence to support the allegations from Paris.
The Australian has been told TKMS did not know of the leak until it appeared in this paper.
The DCNS accusation against Germany has also puzzled Patrick, who says he did not have a preference among the three bidders. He says if he had wanted to harm the French bid, he would have leaked the story during the bidding process rather than four months after.
For DCNS, the leak has already come at a high price, with reports India will no longer pursue a $2 billion option to purchase more Scorpene submarines.
In Australia, disclosure of the leak has served the purpose Patrick intended. Despite Canberra’s initial attempts to play down the leak’s significance, it has led the government to conduct a comprehensive review into all aspects of the information security regime that will apply to Australia’s new submarine fleet.
It has also triggered a review of secrecy procedures within DCNS in France.
Xenophon is adamant Patrick did the right thing in revealing the leak. “I have no doubt the French will help us build first-class submarines but if there is another sec­urity breach then it will put the nation’s defence and in particular those submariners in the ocean at serious risk,” he says.
“This disclosure has huge benefits for our national security and could potentially save the lives of our submariners by ensuring that security is as tight as it must be.”
The government remains unimpressed and at the weekend said it would review Patrick’s defence security clearance despite knowing his role in the leak since Aug­ust. 
“The government does not consider the unauthorised disclosure of information to be appropriate or in the public interest,” Payne says.
Xenophon says this is a case of the government trying to hide its embarrassment, “a classic case of shoot the messenger who disclosed information in the public interest”.

Payne's valiant defence of DCNS against Xenophon raises the question: Is l'affaire Adelaide a repeat of DCNS's l'affaire Karachi?


by Ganesh Sahathevan























Marise Payne & partner Stuart Ayres, who "tried" to contact DCNS
in the week before the Australian submarince contract was awarded


Here is the Australian Minister For Defence fighting for DCNS, against enquiries Senator Nick Xenophon , whose converns are understood to have been motivated by the leak at DCNS of Indian Scorpene plans:

In a letter, Senator Payne told him the IP provisions would not be
released because they were "of significant commercial value and
highly sensitive to DCNS".Releasing this and other information
"could disadvantage DCNS and advantage its competitors in business operations", Senator Payne said."Given the role of DCNS in delivering French national submarine programs, such disclosure
could reasonably be expected to also damage international relations with France," she says.


Remember, this is the Australian Minister for Defence staunchly
defending a company that cannot protect its own "secrets" and which has compromised its contract to build submarines for Australia.


And,as if that is not bad enough, she has determined that a former submariner who discovered the leak must be punished for compromising ,apparently, French interests:


Defence Minister Marise Payne said the government "does not consider the unauthorised disclosure of information to be appropriate or in the public interest".

"The Australian government will review the security clearance of any individual or individuals who may have been involved in the alleged unauthorised disclosure," she said on Saturday.



DCNS  has a "colourful" history, a history that raises, again, questions aboutwhat exactly her partner Stuart Ayres was up to in Paris.This writer asks again , is  l'affaire Adelaide a repeat of DCNS's l'affaire Karachi?

END 






Reference
Doing business with the corruption prone DCNS-Are Australian politicians ,civil servants, exceptionally honest,pure ,possessing moral fortitude lacking in others?



by Ganesh Sahatevan

It is being reported that DCNS of France is to be awarded the AUD 50 billion contract to build Australia's next generation of submarines.

Meanwhile, there has been no commentary in Australia about DCNS's history of corruption.

In Malaysia:

Malaysia's government has denied allegations of corruption in its $1.25 billion purchase of two submarines as it responded for the first time to a French investigation into alleged bribery payments in the deal.

The allegations have emerged in a French investigative case examining whether French shipbuilding giant DCNS paid bribes to Malaysian officials.

Malaysian human rights group SUARAM and its French lawyers have alleged that DCNS bought classified Malaysian defence ministry documents to help its bid for the 1 billion euro ($1.25 billion) contract it won in 2002. They say investigation documents show that about 36 million euros ($44.90 million) were paid by Thales International, a subsidiary of DCNS, to a company called Terasasi, controlled by a former associate of Najib.




In Taiwan:


The Taiwanese government has filed a US$98.4 million lawsuit against the French state-owned DCNS over a long-running, massive corruption case that puts added pressure on the defense contractor at a time when it faces multiple investigations that could bring down top French politicians.

The allegations, announced by Taiwan’s Defense Minister Kao Hua-chun in Parliament last week, are also an indication that the French contractors apparently continued with illegal activities well after the original scandal was uncovered. Kao said additional kickbacks prohibited by a 1996 order agreement have been found relating to supplying parts for the problem-plagued stealth frigates, which cost US$2.8 billion in 1991. Taiwan is seeking the additional penalty for alleged violation of the 1996 agreement, bringing the total to well over US$1 billion.


The purchase of the six frigates has been marked by earlier allegations of massive corruption, multiple murders, and demands for fines against the French shipbuilder for US$950 million, most of it already owed by the defense contractor and the French state under international court rulings. The French government has already agreed to pay €457 million in damages to Taiwan, which is a big enough amount to require an emergency amendment to the national operating budget.




In Pakistan,The Karachi Affair
So convoluted, one report is reproduced in full:



Political scandal brews over 11 Frenchmen killed in Pakistan
By Michael Cosgrove Jun 19, 2009 in Politics
A major political scandal is gaining momentum in France after revelations that 11 Frenchmen killed in a 2002 Karachi bus bombing were victims of a Pakistani plot to punish France for non-payment of commission on a deal involving the sale of submarines.








Not only is it a scandal here in France, but it may well turn into an international affair.
The Karachi bombing victims were all engineers employed by the DCN, the French company which holds a quasi-monopoly on the construction of French warships and submarines. The attack also killed three Pakistanis and injured many others.
They were in Pakistan to work on three Agosta 90 B submarines which were sold to the Pakistan military in a deal signed in 1994. Payment was to be spread over ten years and, as is usual in business deals involving military hardware, commission was promised to the middlemen involved. These middlemen included Pakistani and Saudi Arabian nationals. Saudi Arabia has traditionally been a source of cash funding for Pakistan, and its role in the deal was that it paid up front for the submarines.
The attack shocked the French, who immediately sent investigators to Karachi. They almost instantly claimed that Al Qaida, which was very active at that time, was behind the bombing. The affair slowly drifted out of public view in the months that followed.
It has resurfaced with a bang with revelations that the attack was indeed carried out by Islamic militants, but with the help of the Pakistani military and secret services.
The claims have been made by family members of those killed, lawyers representing them, and even judges, in the context of the official enquiry into the bombing, which is still ongoing.
At the time the deal was signed, French politicians, notably Edouard Balladur and Jacques Chirac, were trying to outdo each other in their search for campaign funds for the upcoming Presidential elections in 1995. Balladur was the French Prime Minister at that time, and as such he was an essential player in any international arms deal.
Balladur's Budget Minister at the time was current French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy supported Balladur's candidature for the Presidency, a gesture for which Chirac would never forgive him.
The deal represented a lot of money and a source of campaign funding too.
Balladur was beaten in the election however and Chirac became President. Soon afterward, he ordered the cancellation of the progressive commission payments being made to senior Pakistani military personnel and others.
“The Al Qaida track has been totally abandoned. The mobile for the attack now appears to be linked to the stopping of commission payments. This is turning into a state affair” said Olivier Morice, lawyer for seven of the bereaved families, after a recent meeting with anti-terrorist judges Marc TrĂ©vidic and Yves Jannier.
“The commission payments (to Pakistan) were stopped when Jaques Chirac became President in 1995 in order that retro-commissions (..destined for the financing of Balladur’s campaign..) were not paid” he continued.
One of the anti-terrorist judges “said that this scenario had a cruel logic to it” said Magali Drouet, the daughter of one of the victims.
In this scenario, the attack was carried out in reprisals for the non-payment of commission. The current Pakistani President, Asif Ali Zardari, was the Investment Minister at the time in his wife Benazir Bhutto’s government. Zardari has been accused of corruption and money laundering many times.
Drouet went on to say that “this is a state-level affair which implicates France, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, a source of funding for Pakistan.”
This new track was uncovered last year by police but has only just been revealed. The police, acting under orders from judges, were investigating affairs of corruption and arms deals. They found documents on the premises of the DCN (now called DCNS) which revealed the names of companies who transited arms sales commissions.
One of the documents mentions the “instrumentalisation” of Islamic militants by Pakistani Secret Service and Army personnel. It says that “the Karachi attack was carried out thanks to connivance from within the Army and from elements of support for Islamic guerrillas” within the Pakistani Secret Services. It goes on to mention that the bombing was carried out “for financial reasons....designed to obtain the payment of unpaid commission.”
In another strange development, investigators are also looking into the judicial aspects of the bombing enquiry carried out at the time by French police in Pakistan. The judicial enquiry was suddenly halted in 2003.
Initially included in the evidence was a collection of photographs taken by Randall Bennett, the head of the American diplomatic security service in Pakistan at that time. Bennett also ran the investigation into the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist later executed by Al Qaida.
The photographs in question were those that Bennett took at the scene of the bombing. They were later destroyed under a French court orde

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/274427#ixzz46tS0Ih00




END

Posted by Ganesh Sahathevan at 6:53 PM

Monday, December 12, 2016

DCNS Scorpene leak: Forget Rex Patrick, sack Rear Admiral Greg Sammut instead for failing to utilize intelligence spoon fed him



by Ganesh Sahathevan


RADM Gregory John Sammut

As reported by The Australian

Xenophon told the Defence Minister that in 2013, Patrick had shown a part of the confidential leaked data to Defence’s most senior submariner, Rear Admiral Greg Sammut, but nothing had come of it.
Sammut says he passed the information on to Defence Intelligence, who never followed it up with him.


If The Australian story is accurate, then  Sammut not only failed to pursue the matter,he failed to see that the leak compromised the proposed DCNS Shortfin -Barracuda Block A1 to the point where it would be worthless against the enemy, and strongly advice against it.

Then, even worse, Sammut failed to obtain from Patrick all the leaked data.That data could have helped Australia build its own submarine, based on the Scorpene. Alternatively the data  could have been used in negotiations with DCNS to drive the price down.

That sort of thing might be beneath Sammut, but industrial espionage is a bread and butter activity for governments and business, for whom it is a vital means by which to gain an advantage over their competition, and cut costs. In this case,there could have been enormous savings to the Australian  taxpayer, but all of that seemed to have gone over Sammut's decorated head, despite he having graduated with a MBA.

He should be sacked for incompetence,and the DCNS Shortfin -Barracuda Block A1 canned.

END





Navigating the submarine leaks scandal: the story behind a scoop

Rex Patrick, a former navy submariner, left his former role as a training officer for foreign navies to join Nick Xenophon as an adviser early this year.
On August 29, independent senator Nick Xenophon walked into the office of Defence Minister Marise Payne and handed her a data stick containing the stolen secrets of India’s new submarine fleet.
Xenophon also told her that the person behind the explosive story in The Australian five days earlier — which revealed the leak of 22,400 pages of secret data on the French-designed Indian fleet — was his own senior adviser Rex Patrick.
The senator told Payne that the actions of Patrick, a former submariner, were those of a whistleblower who had acted in Australia’s national interest by helping to protect the integrity of the $50 billion future submarine project.
Then came an unexpected twist. Xenophon told the Defence Minister that in 2013, Patrick had shown a part of the confidential leaked data to Defence’s most senior submariner, Rear Admiral Greg Sammut, but nothing had come of it.
Sammut says he passed the information on to Defence Intelligence, who never followed it up with him.
It was an astonishing claim in a story that already had become a global scandal and front-page news in France and India.
This was just one in a series of remarkable backroom developments in the submarine leaks controversy that The Australian can now reveal. They have embroiled navy top brass, the Turnbull cabinet, diplomats and spies as investigators in three countries try to contain the damage and ­apportion blame for the massive international security leak.
Now Patrick, who has agreed to speak about his role for the first time, has told of his meeting with Sammut and his decision to become a whistleblower.
Patrick received the data stick containing the 22,400 leaked files by accident in April 2013 after the data had been stolen from DCNS by a former subcontractor in 2011 and had made its way from France to Southeast Asia and on to Sydney.
The 49-year-old Patrick left his former role as a training officer for foreign navies to join Xenophon as an adviser early this year. He says that after he sat on the leaked submarine documents for more than three years, it was time to make public the fact that the French company that will design Australia’s new submarine fleet had suffered a catastrophic criminal leak of confidential data on its Indian submarine project in 2011.
“It was time to get the issue out into the open. It alerted Australian taxpayers to the problem … they have a right to know that the problem exists, that they (the government) need to work with France to solve,” he says.
At first the government was furious when it learned of Xenophon’s role in sanctioning Patrick’s decision to disclose the leak to this newspaper. The public revelation was hugely embarrassing for Australia, France and India.
It was a black eye for the global reputation of French shipbuilder DCNS, in which the Turnbull government had invested heavily by announcing it as the winner of the competition to design Australia’s new submarine fleet.
In the eyes of the government, the South Australian senator had sanctioned a leak that had harmed the reputation of DCNS and, by extension, Australia’s ­future submarine project.
Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne did not accept Xenophon and Patrick’s argument that the disclosure was in the public interest because it would prompt France and Australia to redouble efforts to prevent a similar leak on the Australian submarine project.
Pyne was furious at his South Australian political rival and said publicly that whoever leaked the story could not be classified as a whistleblower.
Yet Pyne and Payne knew within hours of The Australian breaking the story on August 24 that Xenophon was linked to the leak.
That morning, Xenophon had called Payne’s office to confess his and Patrick’s role in the story, but the minister was travelling overseas so he told a staffer he would tell Payne the full story when she returned. Once Xenophon confessed Patrick’s identify to Payne, it became an open secret in government and Defence circles.
Soon after The Australian revealed news of the leak, Sammut, as head of the Future Submarine Project, told Defence secretary Dennis Richardson and Payne of his brief discussion with Patrick three years earlier.
Sammut, who then was a commodore in charge of submarine capability, is one of the most respected officers in Defence. At that time, there was no competition for the future submarine and DCNS was not a contender.
Patrick and Sammut give different versions of their meeting on that day. Patrick says he approached Sammut in the waiting room of a Defence estimates hearing in May 2013 with the leaked Scorpene data.
“I put a USB stick into my computer and presented the front screen of the Scorpene datafile to Greg,” says Patrick.
“I then told him how the data came into my possession and took him through a couple of pages of the disk.”
Patrick says he made the significance of the data clear to Sammut. “I offered to surrender the disk to him but required an undertaking that my name, as the source of the disk, not be provided to anyone,” he says. “He told me he was not sure he could do that and would have to seek advice.”
Sammut disputes Patrick’s version of events and says he was not made aware of the significance of the data during their short discussion. “I did not view the information regarding a Scorpene submarine Mr Patrick claimed to hold in any detail,” Sammut said in a statement last night. “I did see one page of indeterminate material on his computer screen. He did not indicate that this information concerned India’s Scorpenes.”
Sammut said he reported this encounter to the then deputy ­director of intelligence and sec­urity and it was agreed that the Defence Intelligence Organisation would take up the matter.
Patrick says the DIO did not make contact with him and as far as he is aware, nothing further happened.
Yet the decision by Xenophon and Patrick in August to surrender the stolen DCNS data file to Payne created a dilemma for the government, which had to decide what to do with 22,400 pages of highly sensitive data on the submarine fleet of a major regional power.
Payne told The Australian yesterday she did not access the data drive and had no way to verify its contents. “I conveyed the drive to the secretary of my department. The drive was provided to a senior official at the French embassy, given its purported contents were the property of French company DCNS.”
France is believed to have provided a copy to the Indian government, although the Indian high commission in Canberra could not confirm this yesterday.
Investigators in both countries are trying to gauge the extent of the damage that may have been caused if the leaked data were ­accessed by a foreign power.
French public prosecutors and French intelligence agencies are also tracking down a French ­former DCNS subcontractor who was also a former French naval officer and who is believed to have stolen the data from DCNS and taken it to Malaysia for use in a naval training course.
The former officer lost control of that data when he was sacked and locked out of his workplace with the data still on his work computer inside the building. That company placed the data — apparently thinking that it was routine naval training data — on an internet server before posting it by regular mail to ­Patrick at a Sydney post office box address.
The Australian understands French prosecutors have identified the former employee who stole the data and are building a prosecution case against him.
DCNS is also aware of Patrick and Xenophon’s role in disclosing the leak to The Australian.
Yet despite knowing this, DCNS reportedly believes its rival German submarine bidder, TKMS, is behind the story.
The company’s global head, Herve Guillou, called the leak “economic warfare” and The Australianunderstands the French government has formally complained to Berlin about Germany’s alleged role.
TKMS is angered by the implication and anxious to refute it, fearing it could damage its own reputation and place at risk lucrative defence contracts.
Late last month, TKMS quietly dispatched two investigators to Australia to examine if any of its Australian employees played a role in the leak story.
The company is expected to soon tell the French government it has found no evidence to support the allegations from Paris.
The Australian has been told TKMS did not know of the leak until it appeared in this paper.
The DCNS accusation against Germany has also puzzled Patrick, who says he did not have a preference among the three bidders. He says if he had wanted to harm the French bid, he would have leaked the story during the bidding process rather than four months after.
For DCNS, the leak has already come at a high price, with reports India will no longer pursue a $2 billion option to purchase more Scorpene submarines.
In Australia, disclosure of the leak has served the purpose Patrick intended. Despite Canberra’s initial attempts to play down the leak’s significance, it has led the government to conduct a comprehensive review into all aspects of the information security regime that will apply to Australia’s new submarine fleet.
It has also triggered a review of secrecy procedures within DCNS in France.
Xenophon is adamant Patrick did the right thing in revealing the leak. “I have no doubt the French will help us build first-class submarines but if there is another sec­urity breach then it will put the nation’s defence and in particular those submariners in the ocean at serious risk,” he says.
“This disclosure has huge benefits for our national security and could potentially save the lives of our submariners by ensuring that security is as tight as it must be.”
The government remains unimpressed and at the weekend said it would review Patrick’s defence security clearance despite knowing his role in the leak since Aug­ust. 
“The government does not consider the unauthorised disclosure of information to be appropriate or in the public interest,” Payne says.
Xenophon says this is a case of the government trying to hide its embarrassment, “a classic case of shoot the messenger who disclosed information in the public interest”.

Friday, December 9, 2016

To China via Malaysia: Indian Scorpene designs likely to have been passed on to China via Malaysian company substituted for Razak Baginda's Perimekar

by Ganesh Sahathevan 
The Age reported this morning :

The Indian Scorpene submarine files marked "Restricted" appear to have originally been taken from DCNS in France in 2011 by a former French naval officer who was working for the firm as a contractor. The assumption is that he and a French colleague then took a contract with the Kuala Lumpur firm Quantum Ark Technologies to train the Malaysian Navy.

But the Frenchmen fell out with their firm's owner and they were locked out of the company's premises and unable to retrieve their work possessions, including the Scorpene files.

It is those two men who will be the main targets of the French investigation and could face prosecution and jail. Their whereabouts are unknown. Nor is it clear whether Quantum Ark Technologies knew at any stage they had stolen classified documents on their premises.
(see full story below)

Quantum Ark is quite likely a front company set-up solely as vehicles for Malaysian government contracts awarded to cronies of the ruling UMNO. In fact, Quantum

Technologies appears to have been formed to take-over contracts awarded Perimekar Sdn Bhd, a company controlled by one Razak Baginda, a confidant of the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak ,who is implicated in a French corruption scandal involving the Malaysian Scorpene contract, and the murder pf a Mongolian woman. Fees paid to  Perimekar were reported to be primarily for the training of Malaysian Navy personnel with regards the Scorpenes.. That Quantum's CEO Ahmad Izzat's previous work was in graphic design does little to challenge the above.

Given the increasingly close defence ties between Najib and China, it is more likely than not that the Indian Scorpense plans have long since been delivered to Beijing.
END


Revealed: Senator Nick Xenophon, the 

staffer and the national security leak

It was shortly after midnight on August 20 when a former submariner turned political staffer stood in an Adelaide office and scanned copied pages of classified Indian submarine plans.
A little over a week later, details of the leak were splashed across the front page of a national newspaper, triggering an international furore that embarrassed India and the French government-owned submarine builder DCNS. It also sparked questions in Australia about whether our $50 billion submarine building program could be fully secure under its partnership with DCNS.

Fairfax Media can now reveal the man who triggered the storm was Rex Patrick, an adviser to the powerful South Australian crossbench senator Nick Xenophon. It can also be revealed the Senate kingmaker knew what his staffer was doing and supported him.
The leak of thousands of pages of information about the Indian Scorpene submarines included stealth capabilities and sensitive data related to diving, sonar, noise and the combat system. The plans had been swiped from Paris in 2011 by a contractor before making their way to Australia via Mr Patrick.


A Fairfax Media investigation has also discovered Mr Patrick tried to tell the Department of Defence in 2013 that DCNS had suffered the major data breach, but the senior navy officer he spoke to did not act on the information. It is understood Mr Patrick spoke to the officer for about five minutes in an office in Parliament House and even showed him some of the files on a computer disk.
That disclosure is likely to cause considerable concern in Paris and New Delhi, both of which remained ignorant of the 22,000-page data breach for three years until The Australian published news of its existence. DCNS did not know one of its own contractors had, without authorisation, walked out with the classified documents, while the Indian government remained unaware that sensitive blueprints for its future undersea capability were roaming the world and vulnerable to rival governments.
Mr Patrick's eventual decision – announcing to the world via a newspaper leak that one of the world's premier makers of cutting-edge submarines had suffered a massive data breach – has sparked a major investigation to find out how the episode unfolded, who was behind it and what their motives were.
Mr Patrick declined to comment to Fairfax Media. Senator Xenophon said he was made aware of the classified documents "only several days" before news of the leak was published.


"I believe it was very much in the public interest that the data breach be revealed publicly ... I consider the person who disclosed the existence of the data breach to have behaved, in all circumstances, in a highly ethical and appropriate manner and in the public interest," he said.
Mr Patrick did not leak the 22,000 pages of documents to The Australian, but alerted the media organisation to its existence along with a few redacted sample pages to prove the breach was real.
Metadata on one of the redacted documents posted as a PDF file on the paper's website lists the creator's username as "patrickr". The metadata also shows the documents were sent from an office in Adelaide, which Fairfax Media believes is Senator Xenophon's electorate office.
Senator Xenophon came out the day after the leak story caused a political furore and called on the government to consider "suspending negotiations" with DCNS until the breach could be fully investigated.
DCNS did not know one of its own contractors had, without authorisation, walked out with the classified documents.
The Indian Scorpene submarine files marked "Restricted" appear to have originally been taken from DCNS in France in 2011 by a former French naval officer who was working for the firm as a contractor. The assumption is that he and a French colleague then took a contract with the Kuala Lumpur firm Quantum Ark Technologies to train the Malaysian Navy.
But the Frenchmen fell out with their firm's owner and they were locked out of the company's premises and unable to retrieve their work possessions, including the Scorpene files.
It is those two men who will be the main targets of the French investigation and could face prosecution and jail. Their whereabouts are unknown. Nor is it clear whether Quantum Ark Technologies knew at any stage they had stolen classified documents on their premises.
The firm refused to comment.
Mr Patrick took over the training contract with Quantum Ark Technologies in 2013 and effectively inherited the Frenchmen's office, including a disk with the classified files.
Despite knowing that he was in possession of stolen classified material, he did not try to alert DCNS directly or return the files to the company. Then working for shadow defence minister David Johnston, Mr Patrick did, however, give a visiting senior navy officer in Senator Johnston's parliamentary office a basic briefing on the material. Somehow, Mr Patrick was not clear or forceful enough to convince the officer – who was not working on the future submarine program but is understood to have had knowledge about submarines – of the significance of the material.
Mr Patrick followed up with a brief inquiry with the officer as to whether he would grant Mr Patrick's requested anonymity in taking the matter forward but nothing further came of it. Fairfax Media understands the naval officer volunteered the information he had been told of the documents three years ago after the news reports broke in August.
It remains unclear why Mr Patrick did not pursue the issue harder with Defence in 2013, or why, when he decided to revive the matter in 2016, he went anonymously to a newspaper rather than having Senator Xenophon go public with proof that Australia's new submarine partner has had data security problems in the past. Senator Xenophon declined to answer specific questions on these matters.
One question that has lingered is whether other forces have been at play to undermine DCNS. French authorities are understood to believe there were other interests exerting an influence. The company's global head, Herve Guillou, has suggested commercial rivals had a hand, calling the leak "economic warfare".
Several sources have told Fairfax Media that Germany's TKMS – which lost to DCNS in the Australian bid – has been carrying out its own investigation.
Intriguingly, the metadata on one of the PDFs that Mr Patrick created on a Konica Minolta printer in Adelaide shows that a little after that document was created, it was altered in Europe before being sent back to Australia. The time stamp is GMT+2, which is the time during summer months in both France and Germany.
Former Indian Navy officer and now defence scholar with the Observer Research Foundation, Abhijit Singh, said Indian officials have concluded the material isn't as incendiary as they first thought and relations between India and France were robust enough to get past the embarrassing episode. But he said it could help kill off New Delhi's plans to buy three more Scorpenes at a cost of about $2 billion.
Mr Patrick is not being investigated by Australian authorities. It is understood he has not been stripped of his security clearance with Defence, which he has held as a contractor and navy reservist