How the UN, France, and Russia bribed Saddam

[Rudey]

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

[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

[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."

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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

[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

[Kevin]

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.

[moe.ron]

Originally posted by ktsnake
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.

Most of the problem people stem from those being forced in by the governments from all over the world. There are a lot of incompetent people in NY that is frustrating those of us on the ground.

BTW, we are still waiting for the AIDS funding Bush promised Africa earlier this year.

[Rudey]

Originally posted by moe.ron
BTW, we are still waiting for the AIDS funding Bush promised Africa earlier this year.

I heard the French decided to cover that bill with the blood money they got through the Iraqi sanctions.

-Rudey

[Kevin]

Originally posted by moe.ron
Most of the problem people stem from those being forced in by the governments from all over the world. There are a lot of incompetent people in NY that is frustrating those of us on the ground.

BTW, we are still waiting for the AIDS funding Bush promised Africa earlier this year.

That was October of last year actually. 15 billion, right?

[moe.ron]

Originally posted by ktsnake
That was October of last year actually. 15 billion, right?

Yebo. I shouldn't say we cause I'm not with the UNAIDS. But I do know that the SADC secretariat is still waiting for the money.

[Rudey]

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

I know someone that felt the affects of this 'under-the-table' dealing firsthand. This person happens to be the company commander of an aviation unit consisting of Apache Longbow gunships. Due to the Iraqis acquiring some type of GPS scrambler, he had his guys purchase back-up portable GPS devices prior to deploying.

Pretty dark stuff once you know someone's life is at stake...I guess money makes the world go round, huh?

[Rudey]

Report: UN profited from illicit Iraqi oil sales
Associated Press Oct. 7, 2004

Vivid allegations of widespread corruption at the UN oil-for-food program by the top US arms inspector have added credibility to accusations the United Nations looked the other way while Saddam Hussein's government skimmed billions of dollars and offered kickbacks to European and Arab countries and officials.

The inspector's report implicates the top UN official overseeing the $60 billion program, accusing him of accepting bribes in the form of vouchers for Iraqi oil sales, and details Iraqi manipulation to illegally enrich Saddam's government and influence Security Council members.

The alleged schemes included an Iraqi system for allocating lucrative oil vouchers, which permitted recipients to purchase certain amounts of oil at a profit, according to the report issued Wednesday by Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group.

He said the Iraqi government manipulated the UN program from 1996 to 2003 in order to acquire billions of dollars in illicit gains and to import illegal goods, including parts for missile systems.

Responding to the report, a high-ranking Republican congressman demanded the United Nation's independent inquiry into the scandal speed up its timetable and release closely held documents to Congressional investigators.

"The world cannot wait years for answers to the growing body of evidence implicating senior UN officials in outright corruption," said Rep. Henry Hyde, who chairs the House International Relations Committee.

"Immediate public access to UN internal audits and other documents - thus far denied to members of the Security Council - is imperative if the world body is to escape further damage to its credibility as a result of this grossly mismanaged program."

Secretary-General Kofi Annan in April appointed former Fed chairman Paul Volcker to lead an independent investigation and he has said his committee will not deliver a report before mid-2005. Volcker has refused to share with Congress documents for their probes, including 55 internal audits of the oil-for-food program produced by the United Nations.

The Duelfer report said that Benon Sevan, the former chief of the UN program, is among dozens of people who allegedly received secret oil vouchers, with Saddam personally approving the list of recipients. The voucher list was dominated by Russian, French and Chinese recipients, in that order, with Saddam spreading the wealth widely to prominent business leaders, politicians, foreign government ministries and political parties, the report said.

The report names former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri and the Russian radical political figure Vladimir Zhirinovsky as voucher recipients, for example, and other foreign governments range from Yemen to Namibia.
Zhirinovsky denied the allegations.

"I never took a drop (of oil), or a single dollar from Iraq or from any other country. I have never dealt with oil," Russia's Interfax news agency cited Zhirinovsky as saying Thursday. "I do not care what (bribes) someone might have received. I personally gained nothing."

Zhirinovsky has visited Iraq frequently and called for increased trade between the two countries.

The oil companies mentioned included top Russian producers Yukos and Lukoil. Company officials could not immediately be reached to comment on the allegations.

The governments of Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Egypt did a brisk illicit oil trade with Iraq as well - more than $8 billion from 1991 until 2003, the report said: "These governments were full parties to all aspects of Iraq's unauthorized oil exports and imports."

The officials whose names have emerged amid multiple investigations have denied wrongdoing. The oil-for-food program was designed to allow limited oil sales to pay for humanitarian goods.
Asked about the fresh allegations against Sevan, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said, "We are not going to comment on any specific allegation against Mr. Sevan or anyone else."

"This is in the hands of Paul Volcker," he added. "We are cooperating with him fully. Benon Sevan is cooperating with him fully, and we will wait for Volcker's judgment. Benon, meanwhile, stands by his statement that he's done nothing wrong."

Critics of the oil-for-food program and US congressional investigators have long alleged that administration of the program was rife with corruption and failed to prevent illicit business deals and massive kickbacks to the Iraqi government.

The report said Saddam was able to subvert the oil-for-food program to generate an estimated $1.7 billion in revenue outside UN control from 1997-2003. And it said the voucher program, "provided Saddam with a useful method of rewarding countries, organizations and individuals willing to cooperate with Iraq to subvert UN sanctions."

-Rudey

[RACooper]

Hey Rudey I find it interesting that the UK and US individuals and companies were deleted from the list.... obsentively because for reasons of privacy. Guess it's only relavent to the current politcal climate if your on the "Coalition of the Willing's" shit-list huh?

BBC Link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid...st/3722270.stm

Names of US companies or citizens found on the secret Iraqi lists were left out of the report on grounds of the US Privacy Act, the ISG report notes.

[KSig RC]

Originally posted by RACooper
Hey Rudey I find it interesting that the UK and US individuals and companies were deleted from the list.... obsentively because for reasons of privacy. Guess it's only relavent to the current politcal climate if your on the "Coalition of the Willing's" shit-list huh?

BBC Link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid...st/3722270.stm

That may be the case for the British companies, but I'm pretty sure that there is a governmental form of a NDA that the CIA is legally bound to uphold in these cases. This may or may not apply to 'allies' - whether that's a political convenience, I can't say.

[Rudey]

Originally posted by RACooper
Hey Rudey I find it interesting that the UK and US individuals and companies were deleted from the list.... obsentively because for reasons of privacy. Guess it's only relavent to the current politcal climate if your on the "Coalition of the Willing's" shit-list huh?

BBC Link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid...st/3722270.stm

They weren't deleted from the list. Our laws prevent their privacy. I am sure that they will also be investigated if they haven't.

Regardless it talks about who the majority of names and companies were on that list doesn't it Cooper who can't think?

-Rudey
--So stop making accusations that are irrelevant.