In the 28 years since the world agreed to impose a moratorium on commercial whaling, a deal that was implemented four years later in 1986, one country in particular has been agitating for a lifting of the ban and a resumption of the mass slaughter. And all the while Japan has been doing deals with small countries that have votes on the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in an effort to lift the ban. Those efforts appear to be succeeding. The ban may be lifted for a 10-year period at a meeting in Morocco this month.

Today The Sunday Times exposes how Japan has been using underhand tactics to try to overturn the ban. Small nations on the IWC have been systemically bribed with overseas aid, cash payments in envelopes and the offer of prostitutes. Although long suspected, these revelations — exposed by undercover reporters offering alternative bribes to smaller IWC members to support a continuation of the ban — are still shocking.

Japan’s bribes, together with the apparent inability of the European Union to speak with one voice because of Denmark’s support for a resumption of whaling, mean that a decision of enormous importance for the planet looks like being nodded through. A vote to lift the ban will in effect have been bought.

Japan insists it is a coincidence that the countries it targets with overseas aid happen to be voting members of the IWC, most of them with no direct interest in whaling. That, however, does not explain cash in envelopes and the call girls. Japan pays for delegates to attend the meetings and gives them dollar handouts while they are there.

Blue whales, the true leviathans of the deep, are not only the largest animals alive on the planet today but probably the largest at any time in the world’s history, bigger even than the dinosaurs. We need to preserve the whale, not just for future generations but also as a repudiation of the past when our ancestors turned the oceans into bloody killing waters.

The Japanese do not see it that way. Even during the moratorium it used the loophole of scientific research for its annual slaughter in what is supposed to be a whale sanctuary in the Antarctic. Iceland and Norway ignored the ban and carried on whaling. Even under the moratorium, 35,000 whales were killed. But a partial ban was better than no ban at all.

If the IWC votes to lift it, Japan, together with Iceland and Norway, can kill 1,800 whales a year, including the endangered fin and sei whales. The exposure of these grubby dealings means the IWC must suspend any vote until it has established all the facts. The fate of these remarkable creatures should not be decided by brown envelopes and prostitutes.