Between 2014 and 2017, Raytheon made a series of payments to DSS estimated at US $ 1.9 million. Allegedly, some of these payments were intended as bribes for a member of the royal family of Qatar in order to facilitate Raytheon’s interests in different arms export deals with Qatar.

DSS is majority owned by Al Sedriah – a holding company owned by the brother of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Joaan bin Hamad Al Thani. In addition, one of the directors of the company, Mohammed Al Mannai, was an active service colonel in the Qatari armed forces.

In a lawsuit against the Qatari government, filed by the former DSS director, Tarek Fouad, several bank statements were presented that showed payments from Raytheon to DSS. Officially, these payments were for defence studies and reports regarding Qatar’s defence systems that Raytheon commissioned from DSS. However, forensic analysis of the studies themselves (commissioned by Fouad as part of his lawsuit) suggest they were actually performed by Raytheon themselves. As quoted in a Wall Street Journal article, Fouad said, “This form of bribe is often referred to as a no-work contract”.

DSS were the main consultants to the Qatari government on ‘Project Falcon’, the C4I system Raytheon was competing for. While the project itself was eventually scrapped, Qatar was considering an offer from a Raytheon-led consortium at the time.

Meanwhile, the Qatari government failed to pay DSS all payments agreed upon in its contract. In 2018, two of the three directors of DSS, Mohammed Al Mannai and Abdul Salam Abu-Issa, reached an agreement with the Qatari government in which they received US $ 2.4 of the US $ 6.8 million owed to the company. In his lawsuit, Fouad alleged that this agreement was reached after the Qatari ministry of defence suspected that the pair were involved in bribing a member of the royal family, and that they agreed to accept the settlement in order to avoid an investigation.

In 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) handed Raytheon a subpoena seeking documents for an investigation regarding improper payments in dealings of Thales-Raytheon Systems in a “middle eastern country”. A second SEC subpoena was submitted in 2020.

In October 2020, following these allegations, the U.S. Department of Justice started its own investigation and served Raytheon with two criminal subpoenas (in 2020 and 2021). Following these, Raytheon contracted the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP to investigate their relationship with DSS. Raytheon has publicly denied any wrongdoing, but in their annual report of 2021, they wrote that they have also allocated 290 million USD for the “risk of liability for damages, interest and potential penalties”. Moreover, the chief financial officer, vice president of contracts, and general counsel of the Missiles & Defense Division left Raytheon in March 2022 with no official explanation. The Missiles & Defense Division is the division involved in the 2017 deal with Qatar, as well as with the earlier 2014 Patriot-3 deal.