Sierra Leone

WHO owns Sandline, the company which has brought Robin Cook low while propping up General Kabbah? The man who runs it, Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Spicer, claims that he has no idea. He just goes quietly about his arms-and-advice business, never troubling who pays the salary. But the identity of this person or persons unknown, confidentially recorded in a Bahamas bank vault, may prove to be highly significant.

Sandline's offices at 535 King's Road, Chelsea, are just across the corridor from the executive suite of the millionaire businessman Tony Buckingham. Sleuths revealed this weekend that Spicer and Buckingham are chums, possibly even colleagues, their interests separated only by a few feet of expensive carpet.

Buckingham is the main shareholder of Diamond Works, a company which owns one of the biggest diamond mines in Sierra Leone. Sandline went to the aid of General Kabbah when he was deposed by the same rebels who were attacking the diamond mine. Was Sandline supplying arms, mercenaries, and helicopter parts to defend a democratically-elected President - or to protect an associate's diamond mine? If Sandline is owned by Buckingham, which is the more likely answer?

Buckingham's company has invested more than #6m in a mine estimated eventually to be worth #800m. One of his fellow shareholders, the Indian-born Thai banker Rakesh Saxena, has already underwritten Sandline's aid to Sierra Leone to the tune of #1m. He is only one of the many millionaires who stand to gain a fortune from the reinstatement of Kabbah. The massive mining conglomerate De Beers, which also has interests in Sierra Leone, is reported to have expressed its anxieties to the High Commissioner, Peter Penfold. Our Man in Freetown, as we know, turned promptly to those offices in Chelsea.

De Beers hadn't even set up office in Freetown when the coup occurred in April, 1997. More established companies were immediately affected. The coup scuppered the British brewery which makes every pint drunk in Sierra Leone. It interrupted the lucrative sales of British cigarettes. Beyond even the beer and fags, it ruined the profitable trading of Barclays Bank and Standard Chartered, the two banks which between them carved up 80% of the country's business. Is it any wonder that Peter Penfold looked to London for help?

You might expect some of these companies to club together to pay at least part of the fees to Sandline. The estimated bill, #10m, doesn't seem much in exchange for collective interests worth many billions. But Saxena appears to be

the sole donor so far and he is

only an underwriter. The bill will have to be paid in the end by the people of Sierra Leone.

For Sandline stipulates that it deals only with ''lawful governments'' and cannot do business with anyone else. This bid for probity, legitimacy, and respect sounds remarkably like Cook's supposedly ethical foreign policy.

But just how ethical is Sandline's code of practice? The poverty-stricken people of a ravaged country are now being forced to pay a price for democracy that the rich businessmen like Buckingham could better afford, especially if it meant safeguarding the source of his wealth.

One of the nasty circularities to this tale is that another of the companies with which Sandline is associated, the ''military consultancy'' Executive Outcomes, is still waiting to be paid millions of dollars for aiding General Kabbah's regime during the previous civil war in 1996. Executive Outcomes would have stood little chance of getting its money back unless Kabbah had been restored with the help of Sandline. Spicer's company has made a great many businessmen happy without charging them a single penny.

A couple of miles from Chelsea, the Foreign Secretary struggles to defend his definition of an ethical policy. It mostly seems to consist of upholding UN resolutions, even when those resolutions are profoundly inadequate, as they were in the case of Somalia, as they are with regard to the war in the Western Sahara which has been going on for nearly 30 years without active intervention from the UN.

The resolution against Sierra Leone was typically loosely-worded, advising sanctions against the junta to cut off its life force. What Sandline did, as the pilot who flew the arms from Bulgaria to Liberia and eventually Sierra Leone has testified, was to supply the EcoMog forces who fought to restore General Kabbah. Those forces were backed by the UN itself, so why

would it be a breach of the UN resolution to arm them?

In the months to come, as Spicer defends his company against blame and the Government conducts an arms-to-Africa inquiry, the questions will all be about who knew what, when they knew it, and why they told nobody else. Yet everyone involved in this affair, from the politicians and civil servants to the arms dealers and Barclays Bank, has the same quite proper aspiration, which was to see democracy restored. The real scandal is that the Foreign Secretary didn't take the initiative: obtain the UN's support, issue the necessary waivers, and conduct an open, vigorous campaign for Kabbah where government has an enabling role and the private sector stumps up the cash. Mr Cook appears content to will the ends, but not the means. That's no way to secure ethical outcomes.