Apr. 29 - From Niles Lathem of the NY Post, U.N. Oil papers vanish:

April 29, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - The vast majority of the United Nations' oil-for-food contracts in Iraq have mysteriously vanished, crippling investigators trying to uncover fraud in the program, a government report charged yesterday.

The General Accounting Office report, presented at a congressional hearing into the scandal-plagued program, determined that 80 percent of U.N. records had not been turned over.

The world body claims it transferred all information it had - including 3,059 contracts worth about $6.2 billion for delivery of food and other civilian goods to the post-Saddam governing body, the Coalition Provisional Authority.

But the GAO report also found that a database the U.N. transferred to the authority was "unreliable because it contained mathematical and currency errors in calculation of contract costs," the report found.

Morely takes the "Bush needs the U.N. so doesn't welcome a scandal" line but my observations of the President have been that he adheres to a time honoured American custom: Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves.

(Links from Roger L. Simon post UNSCAM should not be idelogical.)

20:34: And from Instapundit, an article from the Washington Times GAO denied access to oil-for-food audits. The internal audits of the oil for food program were only shown to Benon Sevan and that the GAO request to examine those audits was refused on the basis that they were "internal documents."

I don't know how far this will go, but the U.S. has one advantage:

Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, said he was considering legislation that would tie the U.S. contribution to the U.N.'s budget — 22 percent of the international body's total funding — to cooperation in the oil-for-food probe.

Several Republican lawmakers said the world body's management of the program called into question its competence to help in the political reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq.

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Apr. 28 - CNN has taken note of the breaking scandal over the U.N. Oil-for-food program by reporting Annan's defence of his and U.N. inaction by claiming they had no mandate to stop the smuggling and the corruption was not under their control. Annan lashes out at oil-for-food critics:

In his strongest comments to date on the burgeoning oil-for-food scandal, Annan said U.N. officials were blamed for Saddam's smuggling of oil and a variety of other misdeeds that they had no way of controlling.

"We had no mandate to stop oil smuggling," Annan told a news conference. "They were driving the trucks through northern Iraq to Turkey. The U.S. and the British had planes in the air. We were not there."

He called some of the comments he read "constructive and thoughtful." But he said: "Others have been outrageous and exaggerated. In fact, when you look at it, if you read their reports, it looks as if the Saddam regime had nothing to do with it. They did nothing wrong. It was all the U.N."

You could have been more honest in the run up to the war instead of claiming that containment was working.

But you did none of those things, and did everything you could to keep Saddam in power and the sanctions in place.

Further down in the page is what will probably be the line of the U.N.'s defenders, that the US and UK held their noses at the corruption in order to keep the sanctions in place.

A stellar piece of reporting by the always objective CNN.

Apr. 29 - 17:17 Ozguru shows the difference one word makes. Wonderful and pointed.

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Apr. 28 - The Australian carries an opinion piece by James Morrow on UNSCAM, UN apologists remain silent on oil scandal which raises some points U.N. apologists and the left might eventually have to answer.

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Apr. 27 - The testimony by Claudia Rosett on the U.N. Oil for Food program before the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations is up.

Apr. 28 - 18:13: Dick Morris in today's NY Post writes How to Buy a French Veto:

ANYONE who pines for genuine international multilateralism would do well to follow the bribes now being uncovered in the United Nations' Oil-for- Food scandal.

Why did France and Russia oppose efforts to topple Saddam Hussein's regime? And why did they press constantly, throughout the '90s, for an expansion of Iraqi oil sales? Was it their empathy for the starving children of that impoverished nation? Their desire to stop the United States from arrogantly imposing its vision upon the Middle East?

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Apr. 26 - Eric Scheie started off wondering why the media is ignoring UNSCAM (read through the whole thing which, like all good questions, answers questions unasked) and he follows a path that came up with a link that answers some questions that have been nagging at me for awhile.

There are a lot of people who wanted the U.N. to take the lead in removing Saddam from Iraq for strictly financial reasons: they believed it better that the U.N. foot the bill instead of the entire burden falling on the American taxpayer. That attitude was understandable, but did it reflect reality?

Read this 1998 article at the Cato Institute: The United Nations Debt: Who Owes Whom?. more...

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Apr. 25 - An article about Canadian Arthur Millholland of Oilexco Ltd., who was on the list of oil voucher recipients. (Friends of Saddam: Millholland Says UN Knew links to Axis of Logic which links to a piece in Friday's Globe and Mail Executive says oil-for-food program was rife with corruption.)

Millholland asserts his innocence and that he would never be party to bribery or corruption. The article concludes with a lofty assertion of high principles and decency:

Mr. Millholland has travelled to Iraq several times and he has been an outspoken critic of the sanctions and the U.S. occupation. He said he got Oilexco into the oil-for-food program as a way of helping people in the country and he resents any suggestion that he was an apologist for the Saddam regime.

He said he welcomed the UN review of the oil-for-food program. "It wasn't a total failure from a humanitarian perspective," Mr. Millholland said. "But the other side of it was the corruption of it. The questions from the diplomatic side is, did they know about the corruption and overlook it and say that it was something that was inherent in the system and it was a lesser of two evils. In other words, if you have kids that are dying, do you stop the food going in to stop the corruption and cause more kids to die?"

A real reporter would have asked "And when you found no kids had died because of the sanctions but many died due to the expired drugs and substandard hospital equipment, did you feel like a total idiot?"

Or "When you learned that Saddam had a prison just for children, did you feel the slightest twinge of doubt?"

Or even "Can you describe how you felt when the bodies of children clutching their dolls were unearthed in mass graves?"

The reporter, by the way, is Paul Waldie.

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Apr. 22 - The Oil for Food program scandal (UNSCAM) has been covered by several articles today in the Daily Telegraph (UK) as well as other media in Britain, Canada, and the U.S.

From the Telegraph, UN officials 'covered up Saddam theft of billions in aid for Iraqis':

Saddam Hussein diverted huge sums from the £60 billion United Nations oil-for-food programme for the poor and sick of pre-war Iraq to foreign governments and vocal supporters of his regime worldwide, the US Congress heard yesterday.

Senior UN, French and Russian officials were alleged to have connived at the scandal, said Claude Hankes-Drielsma, who is leading the Iraqi Governing Council inquiry into the affair.

He said some suppliers, mostly Russian, routinely sent out-of-date or unfit food, or sent fewer goods than were paid for and padded out contracts. In that way they created an excess that could be skimmed off by Iraqi officials.

One of those named in Iraqi files as having received bribes on the sale of oil is Benon Sevan, the UN official in charge of the programme. Mr Sevan, who is on extended leave pending retirement, denied the claims.

Mr Hankes-Drielsma, a former leading executive at the London-based auditors Price Waterhouse, said that Saddam and his henchmen pocketed billions in surcharges and bribes.

The biggest humanitarian scheme in the UN's history had provided the dictator and "his corrupt and evil regime with a convenient vehicle through which he bought support internationally by bribing political parties, companies, journalists and other individuals of influence.

"The very fact that Saddam Hussein, the UN and certain members of the Security Council could conceal such a scam from the world should send shivers down every spine in this room today."

There are enough problems attendant on the birth of democracy in Iraq without burdening the country with an organisation that proved so inadequate in confronting the previous dictatorship, whether over oil for food or defiance of Security Council resolutions. George W Bush and Tony Blair may welcome shedding the odious status of occupiers. But they should be under no illusions that the UN will prove an adequate substitute. Given its record in the Balkans and the Middle East, their continuing faith in that body as providing a unique cloak of legitimacy is astonishing.

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Apr. 21 - I'm relieved to announce that a web site devoted to coverage of UNSCAM, or the U.N. Oil for Food Program/Scandal, is on the internet.

Good title: Friends of Saddam and the emblem at the top says it all.

The archives go back to Oct., 2002. I think I could probably spend a couple of days at this site. Unfortunately, I have to go to work (the one that pays me, that is.)

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Apr. 21 - The U.N. Oil for Food Program continues to break into the mainstream media: ABC News has a fairly extensive coverage in U.N. Officials Bribed by Saddam? and it is note worthy that the url contains the phrasing "investigation/oil/for_food_ripoff." Do they think people like me don't read the fine print?

ABC provides the conservative figure of $ 5 billion which is half of that estimated by the General Accounting Office but goes further on the suspects:

At least three senior United Nations officials are suspected of taking multimillion-dollar bribes from the Saddam Hussein regime, U.S. and European intelligence sources tell ABCNEWS. (Emphasis added.)

20:26 Roger L. Simon and ABC place a lot more faith than I that the hand-written memo is the smoking gun that finally compromises Benon Sevan, maybe because I live in Canada and recognize how incredibly difficult it is going to be for Canadians to accept that their beloved child, the U.N., is corrupt.

This is the testimony given today before the House Committee on Government Reform's subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Affairs by MEMRI Senior Analyst Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli. I need to read it a few more times, I think, but there are some peculiarities in how the U.N. handled the initial rumours that are disturbing. (End update.)

Claudia Rosett, who has researched the program perhaps more than any other journalist, has a lengthy and detailed account of the program from its inception to the present at Commentary The Oil-for-Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know, and When Did He Know It?. Read the whole thing. More than once.

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Apr. 19 - On one hand, there is continuous urging for the UN take take over running Iraq, and on the other there is the KMPG audit of the U.N. Oil for Food Program on behalf of the Iraqi Provisional Council.

It's still not being carried by a lot of the media, but more and more articles are finally popping up. Mortimer B. Zuckerman writes about it for USNews (The U.N. and the Iraq oil-for-food scandal (4/26/04)) and opens with the point that seems to have missed a lot of people:

The prospects of the United Nations taking over the transition in Iraq may now be fatally compromised... At least $10 billion, evidently, went into the pockets of political operators.

[...]

Coincidence. If you wondered why the French were so hostile to America's approach to Iraq and even opposed to ending the sanctions after the 1991 Gulf War, here's one possible explanation: French oil traders got 165 million barrels of Iraqi crude at cut-rate prices. The CEO of one French company, SOCO International, got vouchers for 36 million barrels of Iraqi oil. Was it just a coincidence that the man is a close political and financial supporter of President Jacques Chirac? Or that a former minister of the interior, Charles Pasqua, allegedly received 12 million barrels from Baghdad? Or that a former French ambassador to the U.N., Jean-Bernard Merimee, received an allocation of 11 million barrels? Perhaps it was just happenstance, too, that a French bank with close ties to then French President François Mitterrand and one of the bank's big shareholders who is close to Saddam became the main conduit for the bulk of the $67 billion in proceeds from the oil-for-food program. All told, 42 French companies and individuals got a piece of this lucrative trade. No matter how cynical you may be, it's sometimes just plain hard to keep up with the French.

The article concludes:

All of this would seem to raise a few questions about the intense opposition to the American intervention in Iraq within the U.N. Security Council, and particularly from Paris and Moscow. In one way or another, the U.N. stonewalled, until now, a serious independent investigation of the oil-for-food program. To his credit, Kofi Annan is now supporting such an investigation, but the Security Council has not approved it, and France and Russia--surprise!--are actively blocking it. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker has agreed to head the inquiry, but only if it is blessed by a Security Council vote. Absent such a vote, there is still an awful lot of explaining to be done.

Will the investigation be whitewashed to preserve the U.N.'s reputation so that it can replace the CPA in Iraq, or will the investigation get to the bottom of this ugly mess? Fortunately, Congress is going to conduct its own hearings on the largest public financial scandal in history--and the disgraceful insiders' game played at the U.N.

The NY Times has coverage on the Russian objections to an independent investigation:

United Nations officials said Friday that Mr. Volcker, 76, had been selected for the panel along with Mark Pieth, 50, a Swiss law professor with expertise in investigating money laundering and economic crime, and Richard J. Goldstone, 65, a South African judge who was chief prosecutor for the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia.

But the nominations stalled Friday when Russia said it would not agree to a Security Council resolution that Mr. Volcker said he needed to give him the authority to conduct the wide-ranging inquiry that Mr. Annan was seeking.

"We understand the reputation of the Secretariat is in question, but we do not think it is possible to adopt a resolution on the basis of mass media reports," said Sergei Trepelkov, spokesman for the Russian mission.

Those reports, published first by an Iraqi newspaper in January and in the international press since then, listed companies and individuals as recipients of illegal allocations of oil. Forty-six were Russian, among them Vladimir Titorenko, a former Russian ambassador to Baghdad, and Nikolai Ryzhkov, a member of Parliament. In a statement at the time, the Russian Foreign Ministry denied any wrongdoing by Russians.

16:37: More on Russian obstructionism in the U.N. on the independent panel here and a new article by Claudia Rosett up at the National Review Online titled Oil-for-Terror?

There are at least two links documented already. Both involve oil buyers picked by Saddam and approved by the U.N. One was a firm with close ties to a Liechtenstein trust that has since been designated by the U.N. itself as "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." The other was a Swiss-registered subsidiary of a Saudi oil firm that had close dealings with the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's 1990's heyday in Afghanistan.

These cases were reported in a carefully researched story published last June by Marc Perelman of the New York-based Forward, relying not only on interviews, but on corporate-registry documents and U.S. and U.N. terror-watch lists. It was an important dispatch but sank quickly from sight.

[...]

One link ran from a U.N.-approved buyer of Saddam's oil, Galp International Trading Corp., involved near the very start of the program, to a shell company called ASAT Trust in Liechtenstein, linked to a bank in the Bahamas, Bank Al Taqwa. Both ASAT Trust and Bank Al Taqwa were designated on the U.N.'s own terror-watch list, shortly after 9/11, as entities "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." This Liechtenstein trust and Bahamian bank were linked to two closely connected terrorist financiers, Youssef Nada and Idris Ahmed Nasreddin — both of whom were described in 2002 by Treasury as "part of an extensive financial network providing support to Al Qaeda and other terrorist related organizations," and both of whom appear on the U.N.'s list of individuals belonging to or affiliated with al Qaeda.

The other tie between Oil-for-Food and al Qaeda, noted by Perelman, ran through another of Saddam's handpicked, Oil-for-Food oil buyers, Swiss-based Delta Services — which bought oil from Saddam in 2000 and 2001, at the height of Saddam's scam for grafting money out of Oil-for-Food by way of under-priced oil contracts. Now shut down, Delta Services was a subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian firm, Delta Oil, which had close ties to the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's heyday in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. In discussions of graft via Oil-for-Food, it has been assumed that the windfall profits were largely kicked back to Saddam, or perhaps used to sway prominent politicians and buy commercial lobbying clout. But that begs further inquiry. There was every opportunity here for Saddam not solely to pocket the plunder, but to send it along to whomever he chose — once he had tapped into the appropriate networks.

Are there other terrorist links? Did Saddam actually send money for terrorist uses through those named by the Forward? Given the more than $100 billion that coursed through Oil-for-Food, it would seem a very good idea to at least try to find out. And while there has been great interest so far in the stunning sums of money involved in this fraud, there has been rather less focus on the potential terrorist connections. While Treasury has been ransacking the planet for Saddam's plunder, there is, as far as I have been able to discover, no investigation so far in motion, or even in the making, focused specifically on terrorist ties in those U.N. lists of Saddam's favored partners.

RTWT.

22:34: Russia has dropped objections to a UNSC motion endorsing the independent investigation. Paul Volcker will head the team

The two other panel members selected by Annan are former Yugoslav war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone of South Africa and Swiss criminal law professor Mark Pieth, who is an expert in money laundering for the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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Apr. 15 - Insight Magazine on the U.N. Oil for Food Program investigations

(Linked from the Professor to Transterresrial Musings post Oil for Palaces and East Side Condos.)

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Apr. 14 - More information on the use of oil vouchers to circumvent the U.N. Oil for Food scandal, this time from Ireland.

Look at this post, which says that a man who was active to end UN sanctions against Iraq, Denis Halliday, went on to become chairman of Bula Resources, an Irish oil exploration team. [Correction: Denis Halliday was a member of a PR firm who was retained for the anti-sanctions campaign; former Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds became chairman of Bula Resources. The link to the original post is here.]

The former special adviser to former UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson introduces the Iraqi chairman of a pressure group dedicated to the lifting of UN sanctions to the head of a reputable Irish PR firm. The Iraqi anti-sanctions campaigner hires the PR firm to seek to influence several high-profile Irish politicians to support the campaign to lift sanctions for an estimated €80,000.

The Iraqi anti-sanctions campaigner's website features quotes from former UN Assistant Secretary General in charge of the Oil for Food program Denis Halliday., After quitting his job in 1998, this proud Irishman has been able to travel the world to campaign against sanctions and the US military use of Shannon airport.

As part of the anti-sanctions PR campaign, several Irish politicians, including former Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds, visited Iraq in 1998.

After Mr Reynolds' visit, he made pleas for ending sanctions. Then he became chairman of Bula Resources, an Irish oil exploration firm.

The PR firm's fees for the anti-sanctions campaign were paid by Bula Resources.

The Iraqi anti-sanctions campaigner was listed by the Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada as receiving 11,000,000 barrels in oil "allocations" (worth up to $3,300,000 according to the Financial Times estimates).

The Iraqi anti-sanctions campaigner "insisted that the Irish exploration company Bula Resources and its former chairman Albert Reynolds were always aware that he was selling oil on behalf of Saddam Hussein's government."

1. Riyadh Al-Taher - 11 million
2. Afro-Eastern - 2 million more...

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Apr. 14 - More Oil for Food Program questions, these involving the money given to Scott Ritter for his movie Shifting Sands.

According to the Financial Times, the money for the movie came from Shakir Khafaji who admits the money came from oil vouchers from Saddam:

A Detroit-based businessman of Iraqi origin who financed a film by Scott Ritter, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector, has admitted for the first time being awarded oil allocations during the UN oil-for-food programme.

Shakir Khafaji, who had close contacts with Saddam Hussein's regime, made $400,000 available for Mr Ritter to make In Shifting Sands, a film in which the ex-inspector claimed Iraq had been "defanged" after a decade of UN weapons inspections.

[...]

Mr Khafaji says there was no connection between the oil allocations, which he says he sold on behalf of his "family", and his relationship with Mr Ritter, an ex-Marine who shifted from being one Saddam Hussein's toughest critics on weapons of mass destruction to being an opponent of the US-led invasion of Iraq.

In an interview with the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian business daily, Mr Khafaji admitted that he sold allocations to Italtech, a Tuscany-based company, which resold the oil to a Houston-based oil trading company called Bayoil, or its subsidiaries. But he says he never told Mr Ritter about his receipt of the oil allocations.

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Apr. 7 - Editorials in both the NY Times (Iraq Needs a Credible U.N.) and Opinion Journal (Saddam's U.N. Financiers) agree!

14:39: It's a coincidence that Roger L. Simon uses the same wording. Obviously he and I are on the same mailing lists.

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