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How the UN, France, and Russia bribed Saddam
How do people feel that Kofi Annan's son Kojo was on the payroll for the company that monitored goods sent to Iraq?
How do people feel that there was a markup to allow for kickbacks of 10% on these prices? How do people feel that often the goods were expired (bad food and medicines)? How do people feel that the money flowed through the French and Russians (more kickbacks) before getting to Saddam? http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/opinion/29SAFI.html -Rudey --Good read |
I can't wait to see the UN's and France's repsonse. It'll be interesting without a doubt.
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I believe Annan has begun an "official" UN investigation of the kickbacks. Be interesting if his son's name shows up as a bad guy.
Maybe that's why France and Russia dragged their feet on getting rid of Sadaam. |
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-Rudey |
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Genocide for Oil
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The reason why France refused to enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1441 was because of the oil. Genocide wasn't so bad, as long as they got their oil. Vichy France lives. Fü˘% the French. They allowed the UN to be completely undermined, and backed the US and UK into a corner, not for principle, but for oil. |
Benon Sevon, the man in charge of the oil-for-food program, bought oil for way below market price and reaped a great profit. His name is on a list of 270 such "businessmen" who were corruptly profiting. Additionally, Sevon was an undercover agent for France (no big splash about the UN being infiltrated by the French intelligence it seems).
The troubles go farther. "Iraq, with U.N. approval, kept Americans, Britons and Scandinavians off the staff that administered the 13 percent of the oil-for-food proceeds earmarked for Kurdish provinces." Why do people criticise the US for not allowing these blood countries to gain contracts after essentially enslaving Iraqis? Perhaps we should look further. The UN was filled with capacity with spies. A Tunisian U.N. employee with a car full of explosives meant for a terror bombing in Erbil was arrested in July of 2001. 4 months later the UN was able to quietly negotiate his release. -Rudey |
A couple of thoughts.
First, every country, including ours, has used diplomatic cover for spies for many years. So, it 's not a surprize that the UN is full of them. "Diplomatic Immunity" covers a lot of sins. Chirac not withstanding, huge numbers of people in countries all over the world apparantely were against this particular military action. Despite the outstanding job our military did in the actual fighting itself, I still believe that the timing and alleged reasoning for this one was ill advised. We now need to commit to the long term in rebuilding Iraq, and as has become obvious, it will be painful. |
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And while people may be against the war, they simply are against the US. They let the UN off the hook and countries like Russia and France are angels evidently. What jokes...what crocks. -Rudey |
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1) Nothing. No further mention in the news. 2) Possibly a slap on the wrist with a reuters and ap article somewhere out there on this. 3) Kofi Annan, Charac, LLC will use a variation of this classic phrase to sum it up, "That is not the issue here; the issue here is that Bush and American are wrong and lied to start this war in Iraq." Someone can be talking about the weather and Charac would reply with that phrase. -Rudey |
We shall see.
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Oil for Terror: http://www.nationalreview.com/commen...0404182336.asp Scandal with no Friends: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/19/opinion/19SAFI.html Look at these crooks - these dirty people who look down on Americans because we weren't mindful of the damage that might be caused to their illegal operations. -Rudey |
Something to consider, for the UN side of the Oil for Food Program, any contracts by the UN must be approved by the Security Council. Hence, the problem for this corruption not only lies with the UN officials, but every nations that was a member of the security council during the Oil For Food Program era.
Hopefully we'll find out why the UN did not audit the program correctly, and why the Security Council members turned a blind eye on the corruption. |
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Here is a collection of articles by the Kurds: http://www.puk.org/web/htm/news/nws/oil4food_un.html -Rudey --Europeans seem to be dirty, blood hungry, criminals and it's time to shame them |
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-Rudey |
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Paul Volcker, former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman. Judge Richard Goldstone, the first prosecutor on the U.N. Balkan war crimes tribunal. Mark Pieth, an expert on international bribery and money laundering. These three men have impeccable reputations. |
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And how many of the contracts by the UN get audited?? Reputations?? Reputations mean jack and that is a ridiculous statement. -Rudey --Expose the Europeans!!! |
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I've met Judge Goldstone. He is a man of character. If he see something not right, he will say it. He is currently a judge at the South African Constitutional Court. Paul Volcker, you should know who he is. From what I've read, he will also hold no punches. As for Mark Pieth, he is a Swiss professor who specialised on international bribery and money laundering. The three men has great reputation. And it will mean a lot when the reports come out. It will be detailed and honest. As for auditing, I can tell you that every UN Agencies get audited every year. The auditor changes every year to maintain honesty. I don't know what happen in the Oil for Food, that is why this investigation will be started. |
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http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nypost/r...ed+nations+oil And everyone's reputation is great until it becomes soiled. -Rudey |
Is it the NY Post? I miss that paper. I love their sport section.
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Enjoy. :cool: |
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-Rudey |
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http://wfan.com/chrismikeaudio/ Good stuff. -Rudey |
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Silent Majority
The New Republic "The United States has expressed outrage at the U.N. oil-for-food scandal but has tried to defund the Governing Council's own examination of the problem so as not to make things awkward for U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. If the United States thinks Iraqis will take more kindly to U.N. paternalism than American paternalism, they are mistaken. Many Shia and Kurds remember that Brahimi remained silent when, as undersecretary of the Arab League between 1984 and 1991, Saddam massacred tens of thousands of Shia and Kurds. And Iraqis have not forgotten U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's February 24, 1998, comment, "Can I trust Saddam Hussein? I think I can do business with him." Iraqis, like most other peoples, are prickly nationalists. After the handover, the Iraqi government must be able to conduct its own sovereign investigation of the United Nations and anyone else. " *Michael Rubin served as a Coalition Provisional Authority political adviser between July 2003 and March 2004, and is now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. -Rudey |
Well an update on investigations into corruption and bribes in the UN (specifically Oil for Food, but on the whole as well).... the former head of CSIS (I guess you can say Canada's version of the CIA) has been apointed to lead the investigation.
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NYTimes For the complete version.
Tear Down This U.N. Stonewall By WILLIAM SAFIRE Published: June 14, 2004 The secretary general of the U.N. tapped me on the shoulder at a recent luncheon and said, "May I have a word with you?" Because several columns of mine zapped the U.N. for its cover-up of the costliest financial rip-off in history even calling it "Kofigate" I braced myself for an icy rebuke. But Kofi Annan assured me, in his courteous way, that the committee he had appointed to look into the oil-for-food scandal, headed by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, would do a thorough job. I respectfully asked if this included an inquiry into his own potential conflict of interest: when Annan's son was a consultant to Cotecna Inspections, that Swiss company won the lucrative U.N. contract to monitor the shipments of food and medicine to Saddam's sanctioned regime. Annan revealed that a competitor had protested undue influence in that contract award, and that an internal U.N. report would be delivered to the Volcker committee. But that was further evidence of corruption containment. When the International Relations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on May 20 requested 55 internal U.N. audit reports on oil-for-food, Annan wrote Chairman Henry Hyde on June 2 that Volcker "believes the policy of the Organization not to release non-public documents is entirely appropriate." I suggested that the U.N. was using Volcker, a man of spotless reputation, to control all information about the scandal. The secretary general said "I will look into this further and ask Mr. Volcker to call you." ... This well-meaning financial wizard is determined to resist all investigative competition. "Take BNP Paribas," he says of the French-owned bank central to the financing of the U.N.'s oil-for-food debacle. "Government authorities can get their stuff, but to the extent that they're contractors of the U.N., no bank can give that up without due judicial procedure. That would violate banking law." Let's advance this story. Two BNP Paribas sources tell me this: in a storage facility in Lower Manhattan, the bank had a large room containing some 5,000 oil-for-food file folders. Each folder contained a copy of the bank's letter of credit authorized by a U.N. official to pay a contractor for its shipment; a Notice of Arrival monitored by Cotecna at the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr if by ship, or the Jordanian border crossing of Trebil if by truck; and a description of the contract. The original paperwork went to the Rafidain bank in Amman, Jordan; copies of the damning documents are stored by BNP Paribas in New Jersey. Though the U.N. purchases were supposedly to supply desperate Iraqis with food or medicine, most of this evidence deals with items like construction equipment from Russia, hundreds of Mercedes-Benz limousines from Germany and thousands of bottles of perfume from France. ... Give us the criminals. Put Annan's son, Annan, the leaders of France and Russia on trial!!! Iraqis are tired of giving blood for oil for cash!!! Bush needs to stop bowing his head to international pressure. Let us find out if these are murdering thieves who dared criticize the US. -Rudey |
I found another good website that blogs coverage of the scandal. The blog entries include a lot of good articles.
http://acepilots.com/unscam/ -Rudey |
The New York Times
The Great Cash Cow By WILLIAM SAFIRE Published: June 23, 2004 This was the biggest cash cow in the history of the world," says one of the insiders familiar with the $10 billion U.N. oil-for-food scandal. "Everybody traders, contractors, banks, inspectors was milking it. It was supposed to buy food with the money from oil that the U.N. allowed Saddam to sell, but less than half went for that. Perfume, limos, a shipment of 1,500 Ping-Pong tables, for God's sake." Advertisement Another whistle-blower, often on the "graveyard shift" of round-the-clock operations at the U.N.'s New York Office of the Iraq Program, explains the workings of the historic rip-off: Well-connected international traders called "the usual suspects" by low-level U.N. staff, who knew they often fronted for sellers of luxury products would make their deals, including kickbacks, in Baghdad. Letters of credit, as many as 150 a day, would be issued in New York by the U.N.'s favorite bank, BNP Paribas. But before the sellers, called "beneficiaries," could be paid (at Saddam's request, in euros, harder to trace than dollars) the bank required a C.O.A., "Confirmation of Arrival," from the U.N.'s contracted inspector, Cotecna of Switzerland. "The key was Cotecna," says my graveyard source. "Ships were lined up at the port of Umm Qasr, stacks of containers already onshore waiting for inspection. You won't believe the grease being paid. The usual suspects got preferential treatment when the U.N. bosses in New York called the BNP bank to get Cotecna to issue a C.O.A. to release the money." Last week, Secretary General Kofi Annan claimed that my reporting of what he told me at a luncheon was "a private conversation" (no such ground rule was set) and that "some are jumping to conclusions without facts, without evidence. It is a bit like a lynching, actually." However, my call for a Congressional subpoena to overcome his attempt to limit investigation to his internal Volcker committee has flushed out a fact not hitherto disclosed. Annan's press aide complained to The Times that a subpoena had already been served secretly on BNP Paribas (the initials once stood for Banque Nationale de Paris) by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Although the U.N. had warned its bank, as well as Cotecna, the oil monitor Saybolt and all its other oil-for-food contractors, not to cooperate with anybody but Paul Volcker and had blown off the House International Relations Committee's requests Annan's advisers knew it would be unseemly and foolhardy to insist that its bank fight the Senate in court. With his subpoena and investigation thus publicly revealed by the U.N., Chairman Norm Coleman of Minnesota, a Brooklyn-born Republican, felt free to take my call. "This is a major priority for us," he says. "There's a lot of stuff to cover, a big universe of documents, and we're being aggressive about it. Yes, Cotecna, Saybolt, all of them." He sent out four "chairman's letters," countersigned by the ranking Democrat, Carl Levin, in early June. One was to the U.S. State Department for the minutes of the "661 committee" meetings at the U.N., which reviewed oil-for-food contracts (though not yet for copies of the contracts themselves). Another to the Government Accounting Office, which had first estimated the skimming at $10 billion. Another to Paul Bremer in Baghdad for copies of documents being turned over to the interim government and the Senate still awaits a response; apparently the White House doesn't want to offend the U.N. Finally, a friendly letter to Annan about the subpoena that would require his bank to open its letter-of-credit files. Now let's review the investigative bidding. The Senate seems serious; though Coleman is a freshman, the subcommittee staff is experienced and nonpartisan. The House is doing what it can. The U.N. allocated $4 million to Volcker, but he hasn't yet submitted a budget or announced a staff. The New York Fed defers to its old boss, and the New York State Banking Department is overdrawn. But since this involves possible fraud, bribery and larceny on a grand scale, where is law enforcement? Interesting: the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, David Kelley, served subpoenas last week on Exxon Mobil, ChevronTexaco and Valero about Iraqi oil purchases. That deals with the income side of the scandal, the money for Iraq (less kickbacks) supposedly to buy food. I suspect Kelley was moved to empanel a grand jury by probable competition from the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morganthau, on the scandal's payoff side. These two offices compete, and Morganthau's office has expertise on global banking. Without imputing wrongdoing to any individual, I suggest investigators supplement their document search by talking to people who should be in the know. At the U.N., these include Benon Sevan's deputy, Teklay Afeworki, and at the bank, Pierre Veyres and Eva Millas-Russo. The rest of the article is at the link above. -Rudey |
Kofigate Gets Going
By WILLIAM SAFIRE Published: July 12, 2004 WASHINGTON All our July chin-pulling about polls and veeps and C.I.A. missteps has little to do with November's election, which will be decided by unforeseeable events. Instead, let's counter-program, to examine a political corruption story beginning to gain traction that will reach warp speed in hearings and headlines next spring. At least eight official investigations have begun into the largest financial rip-off in history: preliminary estimates from the G.A.O. point to $10 billion skimmed or kicked back or otherwise stolen in the U.N. dealings with Saddam Hussein. Seeking to manage the news of the scandal, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan appointed former Fed chairman Paul Volcker to head an internal investigation. That seemed to slam the door on U.N. cooperation with truly independent inquiries, but Volcker last week announced that "appropriate memorandums of understanding with a number of official investigatory bodies are in place or in negotiation." To overcome criticism like mine of his committee's lack of subpoena power or ability to take testimony under oath, Volcker has hooked up with Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, who has been prosecuting two men in an unrelated distressed debt case at BNP Paribas; that's the French bank the U.N. used for its oil-for-food letters of credit. That grand old prosecutor has a staff skilled at following money and has sitting grand juries available to encourage truth-telling. Morgenthau's crew, in turn, has a collaborative relationship (pardon the expression) with the nonpartisan staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (P.S.I.). The U.N. has stonewalled three committees of the U.S. Congress, refusing to reveal its 55 internal audits, claiming that our State Department's members on the U.N. "661 committee" had approved all kickback-ridden contracts. But State has been slow-walking Congressional requests for documents that reveal its own poor oversight and that embarrass the U.N., which it now wants to placate. State could impede the hunt overseas through mutual legal-assistance treaties, and can continue to diddle the House committees of Henry Hyde and Chris Shays, but our diplomats cannot evade chairman's letters from the Senate P.S.I. Who else is on the trail of the skimmed billions, much of it owed to those Kurdish Iraqis shortchanged by U.N. dispensers of largess? Playing catch-up to Morgenthau, a Justice Department U.S. attorney in New York has subpoenaed records of several American oil companies; our Treasury Department charged a couple of minor players with illegal transactions with Iraq. Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, where much of the grandest larceny ignored by the U.N. originated, the investigation by the old Governing Council was stopped by Paul Bremer because its leaks alerted the world and upset the U.N. The search for damning documents was re-launched under non-Chalabi auspices, but the chairman of Iraq's Supreme Audit Board, Ihsan Karim, was killed on his way to work two weeks ago. Criminal enterprises have heavy money at stake in this. Volcker, still in a start-up stage after four months, assures The Wall Street Journal he hired a great senior staff. But one is Richard Murphy, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a veteran Arab apologist on TV. Will he prevail on Jordan's king to get the Philadelphia Investment Corporation in Amman to open its files about financing favored "beneficiaries"? Or dare to demand the United Arab Emirates order its Al Wasel and Babel trading company to explain the lucrative electrical projects that had nothing to do with food? Another is Prof. Mark Pieth of the University of Basel, of high repute in countering money laundering. Key to the transmission of oil-for-food funds is Cotecna Inspections, a Swiss corporation that got the U.N. contract to monitor deliveries and whose "notice of arrival" was pure gold to corrupt sellers. Mr. Annan's son was its consultant just before the fat contract was issued; even after a U.N. audit showed suspicious inspection inadequacies, Cotecna's contract was expanded. Professor Pieth's work will be judged on whether he can crack Swiss government secrecy to reveal the goings-on at Cotecna. Read the rest: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/op...12SAFI.html?hp -Rudey |
The UN is starting to look like an international organized crime ring. They have many great people on the ground, but a few bad apples can cause some real problems.
I really hope that the UN gives Volker all the power he needs to investigate this thing, but it seems as though they may be more interested in saving face. |
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BTW, we are still waiting for the AIDS funding Bush promised Africa earlier this year. |
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-Rudey |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/13/in...=all&position=
Under Eye of U.N., Billions for Hussein in Oil-for-Food Plan By SUSAN SACHS and JUDITH MILLER Published: August 13, 2004 Toward the end of 2000, when Saddam Hussein's skimming from the oil-for-food program for Iraq kicked into high gear, reports spread quickly to the program's supervisors at the United Nations. Oil industry experts told Security Council members and Secretary General Kofi Annan's staff that Iraq was demanding under-the-table payoffs from its oil buyers. The British mission distributed a background paper to Council members outlining what it called "the systematic abuse of the program" and described how Iraq was shaking down its oil customers and suppliers of goods for kickbacks. When the report landed in the United Nations' Iraq sanctions committee, the clearinghouse for all contracts with Iraq, it caused only a few ripples of consternation. There was no action, diplomats said, not even a formal meeting on the allegations. Since the fall of Mr. Hussein, the oil-for-food program has received far more scrutiny than it ever did during its six years of operation. Congress's Government Accountability Office, formerly the General Accounting Office, has estimated that the Iraqi leader siphoned at least $10 billion from the program by illicitly trading in oil and collecting kickbacks from companies that had United Nations approval to do business with Iraq. Multiple investigations now under way in Washington and Iraq and at the United Nations all center on one straightforward question: How did Mr. Hussein amass so much money while under international sanctions? An examination of the program, the largest in the United Nations' history, suggests an equally straightforward answer: The United Nations let him do it. "Everybody said it was a terrible shame and against international law, but there was really no enthusiasm to tackle it," said Peter van Walsum, a Dutch diplomat who headed the Iraq sanctions committee in 1999 and 2000, recalling the discussions of illegal oil surcharges. "We never had clear decisions on anything. So we just in effect condoned things." As recently as February, the official position of the United Nations office that ran the program was that it learned of the endemic fraud only after it ended. But former officials and diplomats who dealt directly with the program now say the bribery and kickback racket was an open secret for years. In blunt post-mortem assessments, they describe the program as a drifting ship - poorly designed, leaking money and controlled by a Security Council that was paralyzed by its own disputes over Iraq policy. The program, created in 1996, was an ambitious attempt to keep up international pressure on Iraq to disarm while helping the Iraqi people survive the sanctions imposed on the Hussein government after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The entire effort was financed by the sale of Iraqi oil. A political compromise allowed Iraq to decide to whom it would sell its oil and from whom it would buy relief supplies. It was up to the United Nations to make sure that the price Iraq set for the oil was fair and that the proceeds were buying relief goods, and not being funneled to Mr. Hussein's coffers or being used for illicit arms. As the flow of money ballooned, the United Nations, with an annual budget of just $1.5 billion, was responsible for collecting and disbursing as much as $10 billion a year in Iraqi oil revenues. Even as the fraud engineered by Mr. Hussein's government became widely understood, the officials said, neither the Security Council nor United Nations administrators tried to recover the diverted money or investigate aggressively. The work of the Office of the Iraq Program, which administered the oil-for-food activities, and of its former director, Benon V. Sevan, is the focus of an independent United Nations investigation headed by Paul A. Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman. His panel is looking into the broader charges of mismanagement and corruption in the program, as well as specific accusations that United Nations officials, including Mr. Sevan, took kickbacks. Mr. Volcker announced in a news conference on Monday that his panel would need at least $30 million and probably a year to determine whether the charges are justified. Despite an elaborate system in the United Nations for overseeing oil-for-food contracts, corruption never seemed to be the chief concern of anyone involved. The United States and Britain were focused on keeping material related to illicit weapons out of Iraq. Other nations that had greater financial stakes in Iraq, including France and Russia, favored lifting the sanctions. And for the United Nations bureaucracy, diplomats said, the priority was keeping goods flowing to the Iraqi people. In the halls of the United Nations, the program became a battleground for the competing commercial interests and political agendas of the 15 individual nations that made up the Security Council, diplomats said. Those same nations made up the Iraq sanctions committee, which took action only by a consensus that could be blocked by any member. The result was a paralysis that translated into acquiescence toward matters like oil kickbacks. Annual reports of the sanctions committee reflect the limp reaction to repeated signs of corruption. For instance, at a meeting in 2002, an annual report said, the sanctions committee "considered a report from the Islamic Republic of Iran on the interception of an alleged oil-smuggling attempt in its territorial waters," adding, "The committee took note of this information." When the committee learned from a press report in late 2001 of allegations that an Indian company was helping Iraq purchase embargoed materials for a nuclear fuel plant, the United States and Britain pressed for an investigation. Two committee members said the panel debated for months whether to urge India to investigate. "Discussions on the matter remain inconclusive," the committee said in its 2002 report. While the diplomats were deadlocked over how to address violations of the sanctions, money and contracts continued to flow through the Office of the Iraq Program. Mr. Sevan, the Cypriot who headed the program, has denied that he received any kickbacks and would only say in a statement that his office was not responsible for ferreting out corruption. Congressional investigators this year disputed that claim, citing United Nations resolutions. Evidence of fraud passed from office to office in a round robin ending nowhere. A former State Department official who was part of an interagency committee that reviewed trade contracts with Iraq said the group detected "abnormalities in pricing that suggested fees and kickbacks." The former officials said the committee "asked why Iraq needed to import gilded tiles for palaces, or liposuction equipment." Peter Burleigh, who was the deputy American representative to the United Nations in the late 1990's, said those concerns had been relayed to Mr. Sevan's office. Mr. Sevan's office said it had passed information regarding suspicious contracts to the sanctions committee, on which the United States held a permanent seat. Even after the committee received reports that suppliers were padding their contracts to hide payoffs, the committee never rejected a contract because of cost, according to recent Congressional reports and former United Nations officials. Mr. Sevan's chief interest was to avoid deadlocks over relief supplies, said Michel Tellings, one of the three oil overseers who monitored Iraq's oil sales for the United Nations. "Benon saw that he had a divided Security Council in front of him and was more concerned about getting the food in and the oil out," Mr. Tellings said. "So he took a middle way and didn't investigate problems. He'd say, 'If you've got clear evidence, I've got to go to the Security Council. If it's a rumor, don't bother.' " The lack of coordination in the program was evident in the fact that while United Nations auditors produced 55 reports on the program over the years, several diplomats on the sanctions committee said in interviews that they never even saw them. In the end, a complicated set of political and financial pressures kept the program ripe for corruption.Mr. van Walsum, the retired Dutch diplomat, said he sometimes suspected that his fellow diplomats were disinclined to hear about potential fraud because they were concerned about protecting the interests of friendly companies and foreign allies eager to trade with Iraq. "Everyone," he said, "was living in the same glass house." A System Ripe for Picking The oil-for-food program was established to get food and medicine to the Iraqi people and to counter Mr. Hussein's claims that sanctions were solely responsible for the widespread malnutrition in Iraq after the embargo was imposed in 1990. Iraq was not prohibited from buying food and medicine; it just was not using its money for that purpose. By modifying the oil sanctions, the Security Council wagered that it might gain enough leverage to force Iraq to buy more relief goods. On one level, the program worked well. According to Congress's General Accounting Office, the program provided food, medicine and services to 24 million Iraqis. Malnutrition rates for children fell. But along the way, the Security Council approved provisions that opened the program to corruption. Mr. Hussein agreed to the program in 1996 only after winning a major concession: While the United Nations would control oil revenues, Iraq could negotiate its own contracts to sell oil and to purchase supplies. That arrangement, according to the General Accounting Office, "may have been one important factor in allowing Iraq to levy illegal surcharges and commissions." Then in 1999, the Security Council removed all restrictions on the amount of oil Iraq could sell. And the Office of the Iraq Program was given power to approve contracts for a range of items - food and medicine, agriculture and sanitation equipment - without approval from the Council's sanctions committee. Meanwhile, the United States and Britain were delaying the approval of billions of dollars in contracts that they feared would provide Iraq with material or equipment that could be used for the development of weapons of mass destruction. Those "holds" on contracts deeply concerned the United Nations officials trying to improve Iraqi living conditions, and drew objections from members of the Security Council that favored a freer flow of commerce with Iraq. Countries that supported the continuation of sanctions came to see the relief aid side of the program as secondary. As Mr. van Walsum put it, "oil for food meant oil not for W.M.D. " Facing pressure from other nations, the United States and Britain agreed to further compromises in the sanctions system. Special Interests in Council Under Security Council resolutions and the oil-for-food program, all of Iraq's oil revenues were to be paid into a United Nations bank account to be used for relief goods. But Iraq's booming trade in illicit oil continued under the eyes of the Council. Iraq's suppliers included Russian factories, Arab trade brokers, European manufacturers and state-owned companies from China and the Middle East. In one instance, American officials in Iraq found, Syria had been prepared to kick back nearly 15 percent on its $57.5 million contract to sell wheat to Iraq. And some of the world's biggest oil traders and refineries did business with Baghdad, including Glencore, a Swiss-based trading company. Different Security Council members had different levels of tolerance for the abuse, said Mr. Tellings, the former oil overseer. When the United States and others wanted the sanctions committee to confront Syria on oil sales, they were blocked by Russia and France, which argued that Syria should not be singled out when the Americans refused to investigate Iraq's equally lucrative oil trade with their allies, Jordan and Turkey. Congressional investigators have estimated that Iraq collected $5.7 billion from selling oil outside United Nations supervision, while the oil-for-food program was chronically short of money for relief supplies. "They could have done a cost analysis of at least what Saddam was selling to Syria," said Hans von Sponeck, a longtime United Nations diplomat who resigned as relief aid coordinator for Iraq in 1999, "and then ask Iraq for a credit to the oil-for-food program because there was never ever money enough for the minimal needs of the people." John D. Negroponte, then the American ambassador to the United Nations and now to Iraq, defended the special treatment given to Jordan and Turkey that let them pay Iraq directly for oil either in cash or barter goods. Both countries were suffering economically from the sanctions, he told a Senate committee this year. He demurred when asked by Senator Christopher J. Dodd who benefited from the unsupervised oil sales. But the senator said he had few doubts. "Wouldn't it be a pretty good guess," he said, "that they probably ended up in the pockets of Saddam Hussein and his cronies?" Mr. Dodd asked. Mr. Negroponte replied, "I just don't know, sir." Hussein the 10 Percenter The Hussein government demanded kickbacks on almost every contract it negotiated, beginning in 2000, according to documents from Iraqi ministries obtained by The New York Times this year. Senior Iraqi leaders ordered ministries to notify companies that they had to pay an amount equal to 10 percent of the contract value into secret foreign bank accounts, a violation of the United Nations sanctions. To do so, Iraqi officials said, suppliers would deliberately inflate the prices of their goods. On a $500,000 contract for trucks, for instance, Iraq would tell the supplier to prepare a contract for $550,000, with a side agreement promising to transfer the $50,000 add-on to an Iraqi-controlled bank account. A shakedown plan of such magnitude - $33 billion worth of goods were ordered by Iraq from mid-2000 until the American-led invasion last year - did not go unnoticed. "When the 10 percent came in, companies came and asked us what to do," said Jacques Sarnelli, who was the commercial counselor of the French Embassy in Baghdad at the time. "We said it's illegal, you do it at your own risk, we don't want to know about it, and we are against it." From his vantage point, he said, pinpointing evidence of a kickback would have been difficult. "It was a shadow part of the business," he said. At United Nations headquarters in New York, diplomats said the officials administering the program were more concerned about relief supplies. Mr. Sevan, who headed the Office of the Iraq Program, repeatedly appealed to the sanctions committee to speed up contracts for equipment, food and other goods. Mr. Sevan's office was supposed to examine the contracts to ensure price and quality. But it was "unclear" how it fulfilled that responsibility, according to the General Accounting Office. At the sanctions committee, news of the systematic 10 percent kickback scheme prompted some public hand-wringing. Some diplomats, reacting to news reports, said they wished, but did not expect, companies to come forward and provide information. Ole Peter Kolby, a Norwegian diplomat who succeeded Mr. Van Walsum as chairman of the sanctions committee, expressed hope for "hard evidence," but then added, "I guess also companies that do that are not likely to tell anybody." Read the rest at above link. -Rudey |
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