May 17 - No real news in this, just more bluster as Galloway denies he was a recipient of oil vouchers. When he got off the plane last night, he told an AP reporter

"It's Mr. Coleman who's been all over the news and he's a lick-spittle, crazed neocon who is engaged in a witch hunt against all those he perceives to have betrayed the United States in their plan to invade and occupy Iraq,"

... Galloway blasted Coleman and his colleagues as being a “group of Christian fundamentalists and Zionist activists under the chairmanship of neo-con George Bush and the right-wing hawks.”

[he said he] met Saddam Hussein "as many times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and give him maps. I met him to try and persade him to allow us to un weapons inspectors back in the country, a rather better use of the meetings than your own secy of defense made of his," ...

Two words: new speechwriters. Rumour is that you can afford it.

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May 16 - Taha Yasin Ramadan, Saddam's vice-president, told a U.S. Senate committee that oil vouchers were "compensation for support" in efforts to lift sanctions against the former regime.

A report issued by the investigation sub-committee for Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has named highly placed Russian political figures as recipients of the oil vouchers: Alexander Voloshin, former chief of staff to President Vladimir Putin, and Russian lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Russia's foreign ministry said it would be unethical to comment before the final release of the U.N.'s own internal commission report, an investigation with which Russia says it is cooperating.

The Senate committee will hold hearings on this matter tomorrow.

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May 15 - Isn't he special? U.S. Congressional investigations into the U.N. Oil-for-Food Progam are getting our money's worth: Saddam spies 'offered to help Chirac get re-elected':

Saddam Hussein's spies planned a wide-ranging scheme to bribe members of the French political elite in the run-up to the Anglo-American invasion, including an offer to help fund President Jacques Chirac's 2002 re-election campaign.

That bid failed, according to Iraqi secret service papers seen by The Daily Telegraph, when Mr Chirac's aides allegedly said they did not need the cash.

[...]

A memo from the head of the 2nd Department of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service, purported to report on conversations between its representative in Paris and Roselyne Bachelot, then a member of the National Assembly and the spokesman for Mr Chirac's re-election campaign. The Mukhabarat described Mrs Bachelot as "a friend of Iraq".

The spies claimed that Mrs Bachelot offered an assurance that France would veto any American proposal to invade Iraq at the UN Security Council and would work to have UN-approved sanctions against Saddam lifted.

Others deemed sympathetic to Iraq's cause are named in the Mukhabarat papers for consideration as to who might be approached, but although the papers detail the plans they don't confirm that any of these people were ever actually approached.

(Via Neale News.)

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May 14 - Galloway may be about to learn that bluster doesn't always work. From May 13:

George Galloway MP pledged to fly to Washington yesterday and confront the US Senate inquiry which has published evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime allegedly allocated him the profit from oil contracts.

[Â…]

During a day of highly charged sparring, statements shot back and forth between Mr Galloway and the Senate.

Sen Norm Coleman, the Republican chairman of the sub-committee, said he was welcome to appear before it on Tuesday: "The hearing will begin promptly at 9.30am and there will be a witness chair and microphone available." Mr Galloway's spokesman quoted him as saying: "Book the flights, let's go, let's give them both barrels."

He quickly added: "That's guns, not oil."

The committee rejected Mr Galloway's accusation that his attempts to contact it before publication of the report had been rebuffed, despite him writing "repeatedly".

A spokesman said he did not attempt to make contact by any method "including but not limited to telephone, fax, e-mail, letter, Morse code or carrier pigeon".
Mr Galloway later retracted his claims, telling Sky News: "Well, let's accept that I did not ask them to appear in front of them."

When the allegations about the oil transactions were first aired in The Daily Telegraph in 2003, Mr Galloway said he would open up the organisation's books.

But in a report last year, after a 12-month inquiry, the Charity Commission said: "[We] have been unable to obtain all the books and records of the appeal."
Mr Galloway told the commission that the documentation had been sent to Amman in Jordan and to Baghdad in 2001 when his associate, Fawaz Zureikat, became chairman of the appeal.

Mr Zureikat is named in the senate report as someone who facilitated the alleged oil transactions on behalf of Mr Galloway and the Mariam Appeal - named after Mariam Hamza, a four-year-old leukaemia patient brought to Britain for treatment. (Emphasis added)

Explaining why the court was willing to hear the appeal, Lord Justice Tuckey said that a gap was opening between the English courts and the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg over the extent to which newspapers were allowed to report documents that would otherwise be defamatory.

The English courts had allowed newspapers the defence of qualified privilege provided they went no further than reportage - neutral reporting of allegations without adopting them as true.

But, in 2001, the Strasbourg court ruled in favour of a reporter who had been ordered to pay libel damages after he reported that a fellow journalist had accused forestry wardens in Luxembourg of being corruptible.

The human rights judges said: "A general requirement for journalists systematically and formally to distance themselves from the content of a quotation that might insult or provoke others or damage their reputation is not reconcilable with the press's role of providing information on current events, opinions and ideas."

In another case referred to by Lord Justice Tuckey yesterday, the Strasbourg judges remarked that "journalists cannot be expected to act with total objectivity and must be allowed some degree of exaggeration or even provocation".

On the strength of these and other cases, Lord Justice Tuckey gave Mr Price permission to argue that it was not fatal to a newspaper's claim of qualified privilege for it to adopt as true the allegations contained in a document it was publishing. He said the newspaper could also argue the defence of fair comment, though it was not clear if this would add anything.

The Daily Telegraph also refutes GallowayÂ’s argument that the allegations by the Senate Committee have already been refuted by his successful defamation case against the Daily Telegraph by pointing out that the allegations are different:

The sub-committee concentrated on showing that Mr Galloway allegedly received four oil allocations between 2001 and 2003. As evidence, it quoted documents from the Iraqi ministry of oil and interviews with Iraqi officials. The report claims that the allocations were taken up but it does not contain evidence that Mr Galloway personally received the profits. The Daily Telegraph reports were based on documents found in the Iraqi foreign ministry shortly after the fall of Baghdad. The key document, a memo from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam, was dated Jan 3 2000 and it purported to be an account of a meeting Mr Galloway allegedly had with an Iraqi intelligence officer on Boxing Day 1999.

Q: Weren't The Daily Telegraph allegations shown in court to be false?

A: Definitely not. Mr Galloway sued The Daily Telegraph for libel, and won, but the hearing did not settle the question of whether Mr Galloway actually took Saddam's money. The Daily Telegraph relied upon the so-called Reynolds defence, which allows newspapers to publish defamatory material in some circumstances, and the case revolved around whether the paper acted responsibly. In his judgment Mr Justice Eady said: "There has been no plea of justification in this case, and accordingly it has not been part of my function to rule directly upon the truth or otherwise of the underlying allegations [against Mr Galloway]."

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May 14 - Kofi Annan was not entirely forthcoming with investigator Robert Parton about his contacts with Cotecna. Seems he didn't disclose meeting Pierre Mouselli or having lunch with him.

Annan's account would change as facts emerged, which set off alarm bells for Robert Parton:

In his first of four interviews with investigators, Annan did not disclose last November he met in September 1998 with his son Kojo and Cotecna consultant Pierre Mouselli - and then, two weeks later, with Cotecna's chief executive Eli Massey - as the company was gearing up to bid for business under the oil-for-food program.

Annan generally acknowledged in the first interview he knew Massey - referring to him as "the old man" - and occasionally met with him, including once in 1999, several months after Cotecna won the UN contract.

In a subsequent interview in January after consulting the calendars that were turned over to Parton, Annan divulged he met twice with Massey before the Cotecna contract was awarded, including Sept. 18, 1998.

But the UN chief testified the meeting did not involve Cotecna's pursuit of oil-for-food business. Instead, he said, the two discussed an idea Massey had for an international lottery to raise money for the UN; Annan said he referred Massey to another official to discuss the idea further.

The UN chief also indicated he didn't recall a man named Pierre Mouselli, though he said he often doesn't recall people he meets casually in his high-profile job. The final report makes no mention of Annan's November denial about Mouselli.

During a March 17 interview, Annan was quizzed about a calendar entry indicating he had a "private lunch" Sept. 4, 1998, with his son Kojo and "his friend" during a world conference in Durban, South Africa.

By that time, Parton had already learned the friend was Mouselli, a businessman who, like Kojo Annan, was working as a consultant with Cotecna.

Parton also secured testimony from Mouselli stating he and the Annans had discussed at the South African lunch that Kojo Annan and Mouselli were setting up companies and were interested in business, including Iraq. The final report said Mouselli's account of the meeting couldn't be verified elsewhere.

The final report also excluded detailed testimony from Mouselli that he and the Annans discussed their interest in Iraq business.

"We discussed Iraq," Mouselli said in an interview this week.

"We discussed about even my way to go to Iraq...We were joking if Kojo wants to come."

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May 14 - (retro-posting) It was worth waiting for:

A longtime ally of French President Jacques Chirac and a leading British critic of the Iraq war received huge contracts to resell Iraqi oil from Saddam Hussein under the U.N. oil-for-food program, Senate investigators have found.

In findings being released today, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations charges that former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and British Member of Parliament George Galloway each received the right to market more than 10 million barrels of cut-rate oil from dictator Saddam's Oil Ministry between 1999 and 2003.

Senate investigators, who will air their findings in a hearing next week, based the new report on internal Iraqi documents, Oil Ministry correspondence and interviews with top Saddam-era officials such as detained Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan.

Subcommittee Chairman Norm Coleman, Minnesota Republican, said the findings "paint a disturbing picture of the dark underside of the oil-for-food program." (Emphasis added)

The allegations against Pasqua and Galloway, both outspoken opponents of U.N. sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, have been made before, including in a report last October by U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer.

But Coleman's report provided several new details. It also included information from interviews with former high-ranking officials now in U.S. custody, including former Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz and former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan.

Among the claims: New evidence suggests that a children's leukemia charity founded by Galloway was in fact used to conceal oil payments.

[...]

The report includes what Coleman said was a copy of a contract from Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization that mentions Mariam's Appeal, a fund Galloway established in 1998 to help a 4-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukemia, Mariam Hamze.

It says the fund may have been used to conceal the transfer of 3 million barrels of oil.

By the way, the Washington Times incorrectly states that Galloway quit the Labour Party; Fox correctly reports that he was expelled.

The transfer of oil to Charles Pasqua was handled by his aide, Bernard Guillet, and there was some wrangling over which bank should deliver the oil allocations.

Guillet has troubles of his own; he is under investigation for influence-peddling and receiving misappropriated funds.

Galloway denies the allegations and last month, the Daily Telegraph was granted permission to to appeal (it's unclear whether they are appealing the ruling or the amount awarded to Galloway, although I believe it is the former.)

The Bethnal Green and Bow MP, who was re-elected to parliament last week running for his own Respect party, described the Senate committee as a "lickspittle Republican committee, acting on the wishes of George Bush".

He said: "Let me repeat. I have never traded in a barrel of oil, or any vouchers for it. I have never seen a barrel of oil apart from the one the Sun newspaper deposited in my front garden.

"And no one has acted on my behalf, trading in oil - Middle Eastern, olive, patchouli or any other - or in vouchers, whatever they are.

"Isn't it strange and contrary to natural justice you might think that I have written and emailed repeatedly asking for the opportunity to appear before the committee to provide evidence and rebut their assumptions and they have yet to respond, while apparently making a judgement."

(This is actually from May 12 - I'm doing some retro-posting to catch up.)

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May 9 - You are probably already aware that a U.S. court granted a temporary injunction blocking the release of documents to the U.S. Congress.

Henceforth, I shall refer to these documents (or should that be copies of documents) as the Annan Papers.

The NY Times covers the story but seems unaware that the revelations the Annan Papers might contain is information that, for the greater good, should be made public.

So exactly whose lives would be in danger if the only wrongdoing was poor oversight and Benon Sevan's conflict of interest?

One clue may lie in a link from Roger L. Simon to a document on the Pajamas Media Website which is said to be to Paul Volcker from Pierre Mouselli's attorney Adrian Gonzalez-Maltes which protests the treatment his client has received from the International Inquiry Committee.

The letter and accompanying documents (in .pdf) are available for download at the site and make for some verrry interesting reading.

Also, Ron over at Friends of Saddam draws some extremely alarming parallels between the Oil-for-Food Program, the Kyoto Accord, and "The Law of the Sea" and our old friend Maurice Strong appears yet again:

Mr. Volcker's March report on Kofi Annan and Kojo Annan failed to mention that the younger Annan had served on the board of directors of a now-defunct company, Air Harbour Technologies, first alongside the U.N. secretary-general's special adviser, Maurice Strong, and then alongside an adviser for U.N. oil-for-food contractor, Cotecna Inspections...

Maurice Strong's name keeps coming up in various articles. If you remember he is the person who promoted the Kyoto Protocols into existence ... Now a story has arisen about 17,000 scientists saying its based upon "bad" science and its a major Scam. It was signed into law in Canada and has already had cost overruns of $5 Billion Dollars just for starters. Its hard to think of a bigger Scam than "Oil for Food" but the Kyoto Protocols could surpass it easily and could ruin the industrial nations of the western world besides. The same type of scheme is before the Senate for ratification and its called, "Laws of the Sea" and it is a hot item for the Democrats.

The "Law of the Sea" is a UN thing and there are taxing provisions that could give the UN more money than any existing nation now in existence... Maybe we should look at what 17,000 thousand scientists are saying about "Kyoto" because "The Laws of the Sea" is from the same bunch of rascals.

He also has a link from which you can download the documentary.

Sheesh, I've rambled about 2 scandals and one in the making and haven't even mentioned Adscam. Since you're already at Strong World, interested Americans might like to read Bill's explanation of this evening's possible dissolution of Parliament, the procedural arguments, the possible intervention of the Governor-General -- and presents an intriguing option: Queen Elizabeth II may be asked to intervene using her reserve powers ["the final line of defense against tyranny in the Westminster system"] when she visits Canada May 17.

I'm off tonight, so I'll try to catch up on Adscam after some sleep.

May 11 - 04:00 - Sorry, I tossed and turned, then Mark got me up for the vote in Parliament after which I fell asleep and slept through most of the night. That seems to be an unwelcome, new pattern: getting 2-3 hours of sleep for a couple of days, then sleeping 9-11 hours straight on my half-weekends.

8:35 - One more thing: I tried to edit this yesterday when I realized that I had failed to note that Ron had also written about the activities of the Friends of Science but my access to my site was down - probably due to another spam attack. I've fixed that oversight now.

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May 7 - Shaken, Occasionally Stirred has a breathtaking series of posts on connections between the Oil-for-Food Program encompassing the recent revelations of how money from the U.N. Oil-For-Food program was funneled to financiers of terrorists and research has led to threads that may tie into the Abu Nidal Organization. Abu Nidal left a long, bloody trail behind him, including the 1985 Christmastime attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports (another event in the category of things that people don't talk about but haven't forgotten.) He died in extremely odd circumstances in Iraq in August, 2002.

Shaken has put all the links together in this post and connecting the dots has led to either a startling coincidence or something that demands a great deal of explaining by the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool (or jail time. I'm easy.)

How chilling: the name I found listed in Montreal is Albanna, the same name I found that linked to alleged Oil For Food fund redirection by BNP Paribas.

When I did some background research on "Abu Nidal Organization" (ANO), I saw many references to close ties to Iraq, and routing funding through Lebanon. Perhaps a total co-incidence. But it is chilling to find a telephone listing in Montreal for an Albanna that is renting a furnished executive suite, and shares the same name as an executive for a company in Lebanon linked to Oil For Food contracts placed on hold by the US. Very chilling indeed. Scroll down to my earlier posts to see how the dots connect.

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May 6 - Overslept and have to run, but want to note Paul Volcker's response to the Congressional committee sub-poena of records from former Oil-for-Food investigator Robert Parton:
Lives 'Are at Stake':

Volcker said Friday that Congress has to restrain itself from requiring certain acts and information from current or former IIC members as it conducts hearings into Oil-for-Food (search).

"It is essential that it also protect the integrity and the confidentiality of the independent investigating committee," Volcker told reporters in New York, saying the probe involved "highly sensitive matters."

"Lives of certain witnesses are at stake," he added. "We're not playing games here, we are dealing, and let me just emphasize this, in some cases, with lives."

The U.N. Oil-for-Food Program was supposed to be about lives: allowing oil sales in exchange for purchases of goods and products that would alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people that arose from the U.N. imposed sanctions when Saddam Hussein failed to comply with the provisions of the cease-fire following Gulf War I.

That program was corrupted, and the money that was supposed to alleviate suffering went instead into the pockets of individuals - including Saddam himself.

The response of Rep. Chris Shays cuts to the chase:

"We just want transparency, we're used to it in the United States. We have freedom of information, we don't have that in the U.N.," he said. "There will be no faith in the U.N. until all the facts are out ... everyone is cooperating, and people aren't cooperating."

(I hope I said what I meant to say, but I'm late and have to dash. Have a good weekend!)

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May 5 - Robert Parton, investigator for the Volcker Commission who resigned as a matter of principle, has turned over documents about Annan's actions in the Oil-for-Food program to one of the Congressional committees investgating the Oil-for-Food Scandal last night.

The documents were handed over after Parton was issued a subpoena by the House International Relations Committee on Friday night.

"I have directed investigators for the Committee to begin an immediate and careful examination of documents received from Mr. Parton," Rep. Henry Hyde, the committee's chairman, said in a statement. "I wish to extend to Mr. Parton my thanks for fully complying with the committee's subpoena. It is my hope and expectation that neither the United Nations nor the independent inquiry will attempt to sanction Mr. Parton for complying with a lawful subpoena."

[...]

After the subpoena was issued Friday night, Parton's attorney wrote to the United Nations and to IIC head Paul Volcker asking if they would instruct Parton to defy a Congressional subpoena.

When both the United Nations and the Volcker committee refused to answer, Parton took action and, on Wednesday night, handed over the boxes of documents to a congressional committee.

Those boxes contain records of Parton's investigation of Annan's actions and are believed to be damaging to the secretary-general.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, earlier was preparing subpoenas to force Parton and Duncan to testify. It was expected that those subpoenas could be issued as early as Thursday.

Congress has been trying to talk to Parton ever since his resignation two weeks ago. Last week, Volcker tried to block such efforts by insisting that Parton and Duncan, both Americans, had diplomatic immunity.

[...]

"It's also being pointed out that if Mr. Volcker is asserting that his team has U.N. diplomatic immunity, then he is admitting that his committee is not in fact independent but a part of the very organization it is supposed to be objectively investigating," said Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation.

Gardiner said it is vital for Parton and Duncan to be heard.

"It's absolutely essential that these two individuals be allowed to testify before Congress to give the full picture. After all, this is a $30 million investigation being funded by the Iraqi people. They demand absolute accountability from this inquiry," Gardiner said.

Maurice Strong had hired his stepdaughter as an aide despite U.N. regulations forbidding the hiring of immediate family relations.

She was employed as his aide for two years:

The UN envoy took temporary leave from his post April 20, after which the United Nations did an internal review of his office and found when stepdaughter Mayo was hired in February 2003 "she did not disclose she was related to Mr. Strong," Haq said.

She resigned immediately April 21, he said. Haq said he did not know Mayo's age or the salary she received from her stepfather's UN office.

"We are continuing with our examination of why staff regulations were not followed," Haq said.

Strong's office did not reply immediately to a request for comment.

The Volcker Commission is independent of the U.N. but is entitled to diplomatic immunity under the U.N.'s aegis.

Got it.

Oh, and one more thing: Robert Parton and Miranda Duncan seem to have more than their share of integrity and steel - fine, tempered steel.

Would it be too low to mention that a U.N. worker is being questioned in connection with the terror attack on the British Consulate early this morning? Actually, yes.

18:55 - I knew I had forgotten something: a senior official with the U.N. Development Program, Justin Leites, took a paid leave last year to campaign in his home state of Maine for Kerry-Edwards. This is not exactly the same as the "fake volunteers" who worked to re-elect Liberals in Canada, but it does mean that tax-payers somewhere paid for Leites to work in an effort to elect U.N.-friendly Democrats to the White House:

Twelve UNDP staff members filed an official complaint with the internal investigative arm of UNDP. The document alleges that involvement by the agency's internal communication chief, Mr. Leites, in Senator Kerry's presidential campaign places election advisers and other U.N. operatives worldwide in jeopardy.

Both staff members and U.N. officials agree that Mr. Leites left his UNDP position last year for a two month period to serve as political director for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign in the blue state of Maine.

"By taking an active leadership role in the bitterly fought 2004 U.S. presidential election, Justin Leites has handed to terrorists and would-be hostage-takers the perfect excuse to kidnap and threaten the lives of UNDP and U.N. colleagues elsewhere, especially those providing electoral assistance in more than 30 countries across the globe," states the complaint, which was filed on April 7 and was obtained by The New York Sun.

"If UNDP staff can interfere with impunity in the internal politics of the most powerful country on earth, how can UNDP maintain that it is not interfering in a similarly partial manner in any of the weak and failing states in the developing world?" the complaint demands. It also notes that while Mr. Leites was "campaigning zealously in America on behalf of his political masters, three UNDP electoral workers were seized in Kabul, Afghanistan, and held hostage for nearly a month in October 2004."

[UNDP associate spokeswoman Cassandra Waldon] ... did not dispute that Mr.Leites left last year to work for the Kerry-Edwards campaign. She said that the current investigation is yet to determine whether then-UNDP director, Mark Malloch Brown, who is now the U.N. chief of staff, allowed Mr. Leites to campaign, or whether Mr. Annan made the decision.

The signatories of the UNDP complaint write that they chose to remain anonymous because Mr. Leites "has powerful protectors within and beyond UNDP, including high-level Democratic Party figures." They added that "current safeguards for U.N. system whistleblowers are inadequate and have been acknowledged to require strengthening."

Mr. Malloch Brown continues to run UNDP, although Mr. Annan last week named a former Turkish finance minister, Kemal Dervis, to a replace him. Mr. Malloch Brown was named U.N. chief of staff early this year after a group of mostly Democratic American "friends of Kofi Annan" met secretly last year in the apartment of America's ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, Richard Holbrooke.

[...]

The Sun reported about the involvement of Mr. Leites in the Kerry-Edwards campaign in the past, and at that time a UNDP spokesman, William Orme, contended that no U.N. staff rules were broken. The staffers' complaint, however, now alleges that specific staff regulations, as well as the U.N. charter, were indeed violated.

"In the performance of their duties, the secretary-general and the staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organization," reads Article 100 of the U.N. charter. "They shall refrain from any action which might reflect on their position as international officials responsible only to the Organization."

According to U.N.'s staff regulation 1.2 (h), "Staff members may exercise their right to vote but shall ensure that their participation in any political activity is consistent with, and does not reflect adversely upon, the independence and impartiality required by their status as international civil servants."

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May 5 - Claudia Rosett writes about new information concerning the Oil-for-Food Program in the NY Sun: Congress Probes Routing of Funds To Suspect Firms:

Investigators looking into the U.N. oil-for-food program, poring over documents provided to Congress here, are discovering that vast sums intended for humanitarian purposes in Iraq were rerouted through a global web of companies with links to terrorist funding and arms trafficking.

The fresh clues to the money trail are emerging from a House hearing that focused last week on BNP Paribas, the French bank picked by the United Nations to service the bulk of the U.N.-supervised deals. At the hearing, one of its officers acknowledged a number of what he characterized as "mistakes" in the handling of funds under the oil-for-food program.

But the documents provided by BNP under congressional subpoena and examined by The New York Sun suggest to congressional investigators that some of these mistakes involved the rerouting of money through a global web of companies linked not only to terrorist funding and arms trafficking but also to anti-sanctions campaigning and front operations for the Iraqi regime itself.

Even in the context of an oil-for-food program that encompassed more than $110 billion of Saddam's oil sales and relief purchases, these payments to third parties were not small change. Payments rerouted inside BNP - against U.N. rules but evidently without protest from Turtle Bay - totaled at least $470 million, documents in the possession of Congress indicate.

[...]

There are 80 as-yet-undisclosed third-party payments still under review by BNP that, according to Mr. Rohrabacher, "BNP does not fully understand." The bank's own auditors found that the flow of oil-for-food paperwork was "irrational."

While some of the companies may be innocent and some of the transfers may have been simple mistakes, there are also signs that this list provides a map to at least part of the financial network Saddam used to evade U.N. sanctions and corrupt the U.N. program meant to contain him - as he was doing, according to testimony last fall of the Central Intelligence Agency's chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer.

The number of companies involved was relatively small, a few dozen out of the more than 3,000 contractors tapped by Saddam under U.N. terms that let him choose, subject to U.N. veto, his own business partners. Among several of this band, the rerouted payments were copious. In some cases, they form a latticework of disturbing associations. These include such U.N.-approved dealers as Al Wasel & Babel General Trading, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which sold $384 million of goods to Saddam under oil for food.

Last April, the U.S. Treasury designated Al Wasel & Babel as a front for officials of the Saddam regime. According to the Treasury, Al Wasel & Babel - under the guise of selling Saddam humanitarian goods - not only tried to buy a surface-to-air missile system for Iraq when it was under U.N. sanctions, but also "played a key role in the former Iraqi regime's schemes to obtain illicit kickbacks in goods purchased through the oil-for-food program."

BNP was able, however, to supply Mr. Rohrabacher with the information that whoever might have been in charge of East Star, the company over the period 2000-03 received more than $80 million in BNP rerouted oil-for-food payments that were officially due to a Saudi Arabia-based supplier, Al Riyadh International Flowers, which BNP described as "reportedly" owned by a member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Bandar Bin Mohammed Bin Abdulrahm Al Saud. He is not the Prince Bandar who is the Saudi ambassador to America.

The Prince Bandar in question also turns up personally on the list of BNP's third-party payments, as having received, in 1999, $353,500 rerouted from another of his companies, Zahrat Al-Riyadh. This in turn shows up on the BNP list as having had about $29 million in oil-for-food payments rerouted by BNP in 1999-2000 to the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool.

It gets better:

Along with receiving funds redirected from Al-Riyadh, East Star received third-party payments via BNP totaling at least $8 million from its U.N.-approved affiliates, Malaysia-based Pacific Inter-Link and three related companies in Southeast Asia (and more third-party payments reassigned from dealers in places such as Russia and Ukraine).

BNP's report to Congress notes that Pacific Inter-Link "is a member of the Yemen-based Hayel Saeed Anam Group, one of the oldest and most noted business conglomerates in the Arab world." The Hayel Saeed Group, with affiliates in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia, supplied hundreds of millions of dollars of goods to Saddam's regime via oil for food.

What BNP did not mention to Congress, though it was reported last fall by Fox News, in an article by this reporter and Fox News's executive editor, George Russell, is that both Pacific Inter-Link and the Hayel Saeed Anam Group have on their boards of directors a member of the family, Hayel Saeed Abdul Rahman, who was a charter member in 1984 of a business chamber founded in Lugano, Switzerland, by members of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood - the Malaysian, Swiss Gulf, and African Chamber, or MIGA. Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, MIGA was named by the United Nations as a terrorist-financing outfit, and added to the U.N. watch-list of entities belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Pacific Inter-Link has denied any connection between MIGA and Mr. Abdul Rahman, who has recently been based in Jeddah. His name as of last fall was still on MIGA's Swiss registry documents, along with that of U.N.-designated terrorist financier, Ahmed Idris Nasreddin - with whom Mr. Abdul Rahman, via his family company, has stated he has had no dealings since 1984. (Emphasis added.)

One more piece of the puzzle:

Amid this tapestry of multimillion dollar "mistakes" is a small, stray thread worthy of further attention. The BNP list includes a payment of $64,900, redirected in 1999 from a U.N.-approved dealer, Jugo Import Atera, to a Dutch company, BV Chemie Pharmacie. Jugo Import - or Yugo Import, as the name appears on the company's Web site, has been for decades the leading arms exporter of the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia. Yugo Import's Web site mentions not only that it specializes in military equipment and transfers of military technology, but that from 1975-90, more than three-quarters of its business abroad, or more than $7.5 billion, was done with Iraq - indicating weapons deals with Saddam's regime prior to sanctions. Why Yugo Import, during Belgrade's era of rule by U.N.-sanctioned Slobodan Milosevic, was approved by the United Nations to sell Saddam's U.N.-sanctioned regime such goods as "anti-snake venom" and "veterinary supplies" under oil for food is an intriguing question. Also intriguing is why it has only now emerged, under pressure from congressional investigators, that Yugo Import proceeds were diverted to a third party.

Posted by: Debbye at 01:07 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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