Think Matrix

Twenty years ago today (9 November), amid panic in Whitehall, government lawyers told prosecutors to abandon the trial of three company executives accused of selling arms-related equipment to Saddam Hussein's Iraq in breach of export controls.

The trial of Paul Henderson, managing director of the Coventry-based machine tool firm, Matrix Churchill, and two colleagues, collapsed after Alan Clark, Margaret Thatcher's notoriously maverick trade minister, told the court he had encouraged the company to turn a blind eye to the military uses to which their equipment could be put by Iraqi scientists. In effect, he gave the company a nod and a wink.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/defence-and-security-blog/2012/nov/09/arms-iraq-saddam-hussein