HL Deb 01 April 2003 vol 646 c115WA
Lord Hylton

asked Her Majesty's Government:

Whether any of the following companies and individuals have been responsible, since January 1991, for supplying weapons, directly or indirectly, to the Iraqi Government: Euromac Ltd UK; Endshire Export Marketing, Matrix Churchill; Ali Ashour Dagin XYY Options, Meed International, TMG Engineering, International Computer Systems, International Computers Ltd, Walter Somers Ltd, International Military Services, Terex Corporation; Sheffield Forgemasters, Technology Development Group. [HL2200]

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Sainsbury of Turville)

The Department of Trade and Industry's Export Control Organisation does not record actual exports. It records details of all relevant export licence applications issued and refused, which since 2 May 1997 are published in the Government's Annual Reports on Strategic Export Controls, copies of which are available in the Libraries of the House.

Previous administrations have not considered it appropriate to publish information on individual licensing decisions. Information on export licence applications issued and refused prior to May 1997, where the end users were in Iraq, is not held centrally and a manual search of all the case files would incur disproportionate costs.

The details of export licence applications from particular companies are normally commercially confidential and exempt from disclosure under exemptions 13 and 14 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information.

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