PM knew of 'wheat kickbacks'

Going to be very interesting three totally corrupt heads of state, and the coalition involved in the illegal war and occupation of a Sovereign Nation, their involvement in the Oil for Food. Now lets see what happens to our Aussie Wheat Industry, going to be very interesting indeed. Australia watch very carefully, very, very carefully I tell you.
PM knew of 'wheat kickbacks'
From:
By Caroline Overington and Jennifer SextonFebruary 06, 2006

THE Howard Government has known for years that Australia's wheat exporter AWB had been ordered by the United Nations to reduce the inflated prices on its wheat contracts by 10 per cent.

The UN told AWB to cut $28 million from two contracts worth $300 million in July 2003 because it correctly assumed the extra money was a kickback for the benefit of Saddam Hussein's regime.
AWB told the Howard Government, via the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's Iraq taskforce, that it had agreed to the price reduction, without saying the money was a bribe.

The taskforce - which met daily, and reported directly to John Howard and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer - had, by then, been warned that Saddam had ordered his suppliers under the oil-for-food program to include a 10 per cent kickback for his benefit.

The Prime Minister conceded on Friday that his Government had received a report from the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority shortly after the end of the Iraq war in 2003, explaining that contracts signed under the UN oil-for-food program would need to be renegotiated because they contained kickbacks - "often 10 per cent" - to Saddam's regime.

But Mr Howard said the information "did not identify AWB as paying kickbacks". Rather, it was a "general expression of concern" about the paying of bribes.

However, AWB executives discussed with DFAT the fact that they had agreed to lower prices on wheat contracts, and asked DFAT to rush one of its reduced-price contracts through the UN's approval process before the oil-for-food program ended in November 2003.
"We need to get this contract into the priority-and-funded list, and get it executed," said AWB executive Chris Whitwell in an email to DFAT.

He noted that "changes" had already been made to one AWB contract and added: "We appreciate the other contract may need a change."

Mr Whitwell's email referred to two contracts - numbered 1670 and 1680 - that AWB signed with Iraq in December 2002, each for 500,000 tonnes of wheat.

When war broke out in 2003, only one of the 500,000-tonne contracts had been approved and funded under the UN's oil-for-food program, and AWB had not been paid for either of them.

Executives turned to DFAT for help in gaining final approval for the $300 million deals.

AWB general manager, trade, Peter Geary told the Cole inquiry last week that the contracts were renegotiated with the UN after the war.

Senior counsel assisting the inquiry, John Agius, asked whether this was because the UN had "insisted that 10 per cent be reduced from those contracts".

Mr Geary agreed that "at some stage, towards the end, yes, there was a reduction in the contract price".

Asked if he had ever been told that the price would be reduced by 10 per cent, he said: "I do recall" that happened, but he could not be sure about the contract numbers.

He refused to concede that the price reduction was designed to remove kickbacks from the price.

However, the UN's Office of the Iraq Program confirmed that AWB contracts were renegotiated after kickbacks were discovered.

Under UN resolution 1472 and 1473, the Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq ministries and the UN decided which contracts "included illicit service fees".

The suppliers - in this case, AWB - were then asked to reduce their charges.

AWB's international sales manager, Michael Long, told the Cole inquiry last week that there were "several wheat contracts that were either funded, not funded, prioritised, or not prioritised" when war broke out in Iraq in 2003.

He said he worked with Iraqi Ministry of Trade officials to "prioritise" AWB contracts.

"The end result was that both contracts were prioritised and handed to the World Food Program for renegotiation," Mr Long said.

He said he did not participate in the renegotiation "except to advise the AWB that there was a unilateral imposition of 10 per cent reduction on all contracts".

He added: "I worked closely with the Australian Government in this regard."

DFAT officials, including Zena Armstrong and Bronte Moules are expected to give evidence to the Cole inquiry this week.

The inquiry may also hear from a second AWB whistleblower, former marketing manager, Dominic Hogan.

In an email already tendered to the inquiry, Mr Hogan announced he had come up with a "brilliant idea" for how to get kickbacks to Saddam's regime.

It involved buying a "large suitcase".

The inquiry is now expected to run for seven weeks, three weeks longer than first anticipated.

Commissioner Cole is required to report by 31 March.

Link Here


The ugly Aussies reduced to chaff

Geoff Elliott, San AntonioFebruary 06, 2006

IN 1836 at the Alamo, it was the Texans versus the Mexicans. In 2006, it's the US versus the Australians.The heads of the US wheat industry gathered in San Antonio at the weekend in the historic Menger hotel next to the famous Alamo fort, where more than 200 Texans are believed to have died trying to outgun thousands of Mexicans.

"Hang on, at the Alamo the good guys lost!" joked Alan Tracy, president of the US Wheat Associates, when The Australian asked for a photograph outside the famous battleground.
Clearly, this is no Alamo for Tracy. As the head of the US's biggest wheat lobby, he's a hero of the industry for helping expose AWB and its role in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. And does he feel vindicated? "Yes".

Before Tracy launched into a 40-minute speech to delegates, in which he would again attack AWB and call for more congressional action against the company, Kansas wheat-grower Ron Suppes opened the meeting with a prayer, entitled: "Lord, we recognise the power of wheat." The crowd sat with heads bowed.

They stayed silent, stunned, as Tracy went through the past three years of the AWB scandal and the revelations more recently from the Cole inquiry.

When he finished, the delegates unanimously endorsed 11 resolutions, which, among other things, stated that "AWB has used its unfair advantages for decades to undercut US wheat sales and hurt American farmers".

To many at the conference, the attitude appeared to be that the AWB had it coming.
"I used to be in Singapore and I came up against them. Let's just say they were not my favourite people," said Tom Mick, chief executive officer of the Washington state wheat commission. "It was all the same stuff that is coming out now. You can't compete with that."

AWB was the big ugly Australian. Tracy told delegates: "It is a vast, independent multinational corporation which uses its monopoly control of Australian export wheat supplies to compete unfairly against American farmers."

The Wheat Associates, or USW as it is known, warned in 2003 that AWB was paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime.

Mr Tracy and USW were attacked by AWB and the Howard Government for "reprehensible" attacks.

"2003 was not the year of wine and roses," Tracy said. "When USW persisted in raising questions about possible kickbacks from the AWB to Saddam's regime, the AWB attacked us.

"Publicly, AWB managing director Andrew Lindberg called our observations an 'act of desperation'. Privately, letters and emails from AWB employees were much more vivid and, in some cases, downright manic."

He says he has no issue with Australian wheat farmers, just the way Australia's single desk monopoly system for marketing wheat tilts the playing field in Australia's favour, to say nothing of the allegations of bribes the AWB paid, not only in Iraq.

"I believe that whatever happens to the AWB in Australia, they should pay a price in the US," he said, "because American farmers have paid a price for AWB practices."

Very Very Interesting I Say

Link Here

US wheat lobby urges AWB ban

By Geoff ElliottFebruary 06, 2006

AUSTRALIAN farmers could be frozen out of the world's biggest wheat exchanges under a plan by the US wheat lobby recommending that Congress and three powerful commodity exchanges ban AWB from US markets.If implemented, the ban would disrupt the world trade in wheat, as AWB is one of the biggest users of the exchanges.

It would also kill AWB's monopoly on exports, forcing Australian farmers to market their wheat individually.

Alan Tracy, president of the US Wheat Associates, which represents 80 per cent of US wheat growers, told more than 200 delegates at the group's annual general meeting at the weekend he would ask Congress to "suspend the AWB monopoly from participating in the US futures markets".

AWB uses the exchange's futures, or forward, contracts extensively to lock in wheat prices for farmers.

"While our suggestion of this option has caused some heartburn at the exchanges, it is one action that would have a real impact on AWB," said Mr Tracy, a former White House adviser on agriculture during the Reagan administration.

"We think it's worth putting on the table."

As the scandal escalated yesterday, ahead of a return to federal parliament this week, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer singled out Labor's Kevin Rudd over his attacks on the Government.

"I am delighted, I am very pleased that Mr Rudd has come to the same conclusion we came to years ago - that Saddam Hussein's regime is an evil regime," he said.

There are three main exchanges in the US: the Chicago Board of Trade, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange and the Kansas City Board of Trade.

Mark Bagan, chief executive of the Minneapolis exchange, said such a ban would be unprecedented in the history of the US futures markets.

He said he had not been told of the Wheat Associates proposal and he would not support a ban.

"All market participants that are using our markets for price discovery are welcome," he told The Australian.

"We support the Australian Wheat Board and what they do in our market place."

While he was aware of the Cole inquiry into AWB's involvement in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal, Mr Bagan said, AWB had not specifically violated any of the rules of the futures market.

"The only market participants that are ever banned in the US futures exchanges are people that are violating the rules of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (the chief regulatory body)," he said.

The oil-for-food inquiry "doesn't have anything to do with futures exchanges or futures regulation".

Officials from the Chicago and Kansas exchanges did not return calls.

A ban would end AWB's ability to run the single desk. "From our standpoint, what we would like to see is that much additional pressure towards eliminating the monopoly status in the first place, not punishing individual Australian wheat farmers," Mr Bagan said.

The wheat associates have long called for the dismantling of the Australian single desk system, the chief reason they did not support the US-Australia free trade agreement.

Mr Tracy said he was gathering support in Congress, particularly after revelations last week that the Australian Government had lobbied Senator Norm Coleman, head of the Senate investigations committee, to drop an inquiry into AWB's involvement in the oil-for-food program.

"It is a big mistake to mislead a US senator, as the Australians have just discovered," he said.

Mr Tracy also revealed that House of Representatives congressman Earl Pomeroy, a Democrat from North Dakota, a wheat state, had contacted him and was "examining options for pursuing the issue".

The Bush administration is supporting the US wheat lobby's push for reform of single-desk operations, namely Australia's and Canada's, through the World Trade Organisation's DOHA round.

"We can wait and hope the Australians will do the right things themselves, and rid themselves of this dinosaur," Mr Tracy told delegates. "Or we can take actions here that will call international attention to the AWB's anti-competitive and illicit behaviours. I say let us not sit on our hands."

Mr Tracy called on the US to prohibit any financial support for AWB's US subsidiary through the use of the US Export-Import Bank programs, particularly for wheat sales to Iraq and the US Department of Agriculture's export credit program.

The USDA suspended AWB on November 10 but reinstated the company a few days later, saying AWB has agreed to a voluntary suspension.

But Mr Tracy claimed the department had reinstated the AWB after "Australia's Foreign Minister got to an under-secretary at our State Department, and politics won the day".

"We think this was wrong, that USDA was right, and that the suspension should be re-established now."

Link Here

The Real Story of the UN Oil-for-Food Scandal: Bush Fingerprints

The Real Story of the UN Oil-for-Food Scandal: Bush Fingerprints

First Published May 21, 2005

British Member of Parliament George Galloway presented the U.S. Senate with the best tongue lashing since U.S. Army counsel Joseph Welch excoriated Senator Joseph McCarthy over his witch hunt directed at one of Welch’s law firm associates who had been a member of the Lawyer’s Guild: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

The May 17 testimony by Galloway, the newly-elected Respect Party member for East London’s Bethnal Green and Bow constituency was in response to a report issued by Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman’s Permanent Select Subcommittee on Investigations that charged Galloway with personally profiting from Iraq’s United Nations Oil-for-Food program.

For Galloway, it was déjà vu. He had already successfully fended off charges that he accepted oil money from Saddam Hussein and successfully sued the neoconservative- owned Daily Telegraph for libel. Articles in the Telegraph and Christian Science Monitor citing documents from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry implicating Galloway in the Oil-for-Food scandal were later determined to be forgeries.

Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. occupation authorities in Iraq invited Telegraph reporters into the bombed out remains of Iraqi intelligence headquarters. Among the documents “found” by the paper’s reporters were those that “revealed” that Galloway had solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars from Iraq, funds skimmed from the Oil-for-Food program.

Coleman’s committee resurrected the spurious charges against Galloway in its report. Mark L. Greenblatt, the Counsel for the Committee, relied on new suspicious documents said to have been obtained from the Iraqi Oil Ministry, now run by convicted bank embezzler and disinformation source Ahmad Chalabi. In addition, former Saddam officials Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Foreign Minister, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, and an unnamed “senior official” of the regime, who are all incarcerated in U.S. military prisons awaiting trials that could lead to the death penalty, were all cited by Coleman’s committee as supporting the documents used to charge Galloway and his humanitarian charity Mariam’s Appeal with accepting oil proceeds from Iraq. Coleman stated that the ex-Iraqi officials were not looking for leniency in describing Iraq’s oil deals with foreign officials. However, Coleman failed to state that the chief Iraqi prosecutor for the upcoming trials is Salem Chalabi, the nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, whose oil ministry was reported by the committee to have produced the questionable documents. Salem is also a law partner of Marc Zell, the East Jerusalem-based former law partner of outgoing Pentagon official Douglas Feith, whose former aide, Lawrence A. Franklin, has been indicted for passing classified information to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – a major funder of Coleman’s political campaigns and multiple trips to Israel – and Israeli embassy officials.

Poorly reproduced copies produced by the committee indicated that a Jordanian businessman and philanthropist named Fawaz Zuraiqat was the middleman for the oil transactions. Zuraiqat, who did business in Iraq during Saddam’s regime, became the chairman of Mariam’s Appeal after Galloway stepped down.

During the testimony, Greenblatt testified that the unnamed official was asked, “Did Iraq grant oil allocations to Galloway?” The counsel said the official tersely responded with, “Yes.” Greenblatt also testified that the senior unnamed official confirmed “a document” used as proof against Galloway was authentic. Coleman asked Greenblatt how he knew the documents in question were genuine. Greenblatt responded that they “corroborate with other documents.” Galloway later pointed out in his testimony that other documents from the same time period as those produced by the committee were proven to be forgeries.

The committee’s documents allegedly obtained from the Iraqi Oil Ministry contain references to an oil company called Aredio Petroleum Company. One document contains the words “Fawaz Zuraiqat – Mariam’s Appeal” in parentheses after “Aredio Petroleum Company.” Galloway testified that he had never heard of Aredio Petroleum before the Senate hearing. Galloway and observers at the press conference noted that the committee not only translated the Oil Ministry documents and prepared a manipulated version to serve as report exhibits but also covered the poorly-copied Arabic versions with the manipulated English copies, making it impossible to read in their entirety the original Arabic text.

Carl Levin, who once was also accused by neoconservatives of accepting Oil-for-Food money from Saddam Hussein’s government, concentrated on the role of Bayoil, a Houston-based company, in evading Iraqi sanctions and profiting from the Oil-for-Food program.

One “beneficiary list” – supposedly found in the archives of the Iraqi Oil Ministry and translated by the shadowy Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Washington, DC-based group with links to Israel’s Likud Party – contained the name Shaker Al-Khafajji, an Iraqi-American businessman who was reported to have given $400,000 to former UN weapons inspector and war critic Scott Ritter to produce a documentary. According to the alleged oil ministry documents, Al-Khafajji was said to have received a 10.5 million barrel oil allocation from Iraq. That same list contained the name of George Galloway, who was listed as a recipient or co-recipient of 19 million barrels of Iraqi oil. Galloway’s Mariam’s Appeal contributor and later chairman Fawaz Zureikat (the spelling used in the MEMRI documents), was said to have received 6 million barrels. The list was also published in Baghdad by a new independent newspaper named Al Mada,

When pressed by Coleman if he knew that Mariam’s Appeal, named for an Iraqi girl who was battling cancer, had received money from Saddam through Zuraiqat, Galloway said that the Jordanian businessman was the charity’s third largest donor (375,000 British pounds) after United Arab Emirates President Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahayan and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Galloway said Zuraiqat made introductions on behalf of Mariam’s Appeal in Baghdad and that he was not aware of all of Zuraiqat’s business dealings. Galloway said that Coleman likely “didn’t know what business his AIPAC donators were involved in.” Galloway drew the committee’s attention to the fact that British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith ordered the British Charity Commission to investigate Mariam’s Appeal and found “no problem” after “every penny in and out” were scrutinized. He said the audit found no donations from Aredio Petroleum as alleged in the committee documents. Galloway said Zuraiqat never gave him any money from “an oil deal, a cake deal, or a bread deal.”

The charges brought by Coleman’s committee largely rehashed the original accusations contained in the MEMRI-laundered documents. Those same MEMRI documents contained the names of French Senator and former Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who was also cited in the Coleman Committee documents. Other recipients named in the MEMRI-tainted documents included the very same Russian political parties and leaders mentioned in the Coleman Committee report, including Vladimir Zhironovsky’s Russian Liberal Democratic Party. Even an adviser to anti-war Pope John Paul II, French priest Father Jean-Marie Benjamin, was implicated in the MEMRI documents. Benjamin was accused of accepting 4.5 million barrels of oil because he arranged a meeting between Tariq Aziz, an Iraqi Christian, and the Pope. Benjamin is Secretary General of the Assisi-based Beato Angelica Foundation and once served as a special events official for UNICEF where he collaborated with the late actors Peter Ustinov and Audrey Hepburn.

In addition to anti-Iraq war political parties, politicians, and businessmen in France, Russia, Britain, Indonesia, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Serbia, Canada, Lebanon, Palestine, Brazil, Egypt, India, South Africa, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Kenya, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, Netherlands, China, Vietnam, Yemen, Nigeria, Sudan, Thailand, Tunisia, Pakistan, Chad, Myanmar, Belarus, Austria, and Ukraine, U.S. politicians who opposed the Iraqi war were also implicated because they supposedly (according to the neocon spin machine of newspapers and web sites) accepted campaign contributions from Al-Khafajji. Among Al-Khafajji’s recipients were Michigan Democrats Carl Levin, David Bonior, and John Conyers, as well as Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s 1996 presidential campaign. The neocons claimed that all five Democratic leaders were involved in the Oil-for-Food scandal by association with Al-Khafajji’s political donations.

According to the Calgary Sun, Canadian Arthur Milholland, the CEO of Calgary-based Oilexco (which allegedly received 9.6 million barrels of oil from Saddam), directly implicated MEMRI in the forgeries of the documents used by the Telegraph and Al Mada (also cited by the Coleman Committee). He told the paper, MEMRI “has some motives.” Leith Shbeilat, chairman of the anti-corruption committee of the Jordanian Parliament was alleged to have received 15.5 million barrels of oil from Saddam. It is noteworthy that Shbeilat heads a committee that has jurisdiction over calls to have current Iraqi Oil Minister Ahmad Chalabi extradited to Jordan to serve a long prison sentence for his conviction for embezzling $300 million from the collapsed Petra Bank of Jordan, the third largest bank in the country.

Galloway testified that Coleman, a lawyer, had been “cavalier with justice” in his investigation and accusations. Galloway also noted several errors in the committee documents and report. He said he met with Saddam twice – in 1994 and August 2002 and that did not constitute “many meetings” as stated in the Republican majority report. Galloway said he met with Saddam as many times as Donald Rumsfeld. However, Galloway said while that he met with Saddam to avert war, Rumsfeld met with him “to sell him guns and give him maps.”

When Coleman accused Galloway of being an outspoken supporter of Saddam’s regime, Galloway responded by emphasizing that he condemned Saddam in outspoken terms and provided the committee with a dossier containing Hansard parliamentary records of those denunciations. Galloway said he had a better record of opposition to Saddam than Coleman or “any other member of the American or British governments.”

Galloway also criticized Coleman for quoting an unnamed source without finding out if the allegations were true. He asked Coleman, “Who is this senior former official? Don’t I or the committee or the public have a right to know?” In a dramatic moment, Galloway thundered, “You have nothing on me Senator other than my name on lists from your puppet government in Iraq.” Galloway added, “Knowing how you treat prisoners, I’m not sure how much credibility can be placed on the statements of prisoners.” He said, “Iraq never paid a cent to me or to Mariam’s Appeal.”

Galloway said that one of the Coleman committee’s most serious mistakes was stating that its alleged newly discovered documents covered a different period of time than the Daily Telegraph 2001 documents. He pointed out that the Telegraph documents covered 2001 and that they dated identically to the documents in the committee’s report. Galloway stated that the Christian Science Monitor published documents from 1992 and 1993 alleging that Galloway accepted Iraqi oil money but that these were unmasked as forgeries. Although the 1992 and 1993 documents were said to deal with the Oil-for-Food program, Galloway emphasized that the program did not exist then. However, Ga,oway said that neocon web sites and papers were “all cock-a-hoot over the documents,” later proven to be forgeries.

Galloway said the case for war was “a pack of lies” and that the Coleman Committee hearings was the “mother of all smoke screens” to divert attention away from the real Oil-for-Food scandal. He said that Halliburton had stolen Iraq’s money and that $8 billion of Iraq’s wealth had been stolen since the war. In addition, Galloway pointed out that $800 million in cash was given out in Iraq by U.S. military commanders. Galloway said told the committee that the “real sanctions busters were your own companies and politicians.”

Galloway was correct in criticizing the Coleman Committee for not concentrating on U.S. violations of Iraqi sanctions and pay-offs to Saddam in the Oil-for-Food program. The U.S. oil companies involved in the sanctions busting have long-standing connections to the Bush family and their largest corporate benefactors. The Democratic minority report stated, “From 2000 to 2002, Bayoil (USA), Inc., and its affiliates, operating out of Houston, Texas, became one of the largest importers of Iraqi oil into the United States.” The report also states, “Samir Vincent, an Iraq-born American, obtained Iraqi oil allocations through his company Phoenix International LLC (McLean, Virginia), and sold them to Chevron Products Company, a division of Chevron USA, Inc.” Federal authorities later indicted Vincent for his role in the oil-for-food scheme. Vincent pleaded guilty. Vincent was a close confidante of 1996 Republican Vice Presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who had opposed the Iraqi sanctions. Newsweek magazine reported that in October 2004, the FBI interviewed Kemp about his relationship with Vincent. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat on the board of Chevron before she joined the Bush White House as National Security Adviser. The company named one of its oil supertankers the SS Condoleezza Rice.

Bayoil is incorporated in the Bahamas with affiliates in Switzerland and Luxembourg. A Chilean-Italian named Augusto Giangrandi, a resident of Florida, served as chairman of Bayoil. Although Bayoil principals David Chalmers, Jr., Briton John Irving, and Ludmil Dionissiev, a Bulgarian citizen and permanent resident of Houston, were indicted, Giangrandi was not touched.

Giangrandi has a history that goes back to the Iran-Iraq war when Donald Rumsfeld was helping to arm Saddam and when the Reagan-Bush administration was violating UN arms sanctions imposed against both warring parties. During the war, Iraq bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cluster bombs and other weapons from Carlos Cardoen, a Chilean arms manufacturer who was close to Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. In 1983, Cardoen hired Giangrandi, then a resident of Florida, to ship zirconium from the United States to Iraq. Zirconium is used in the manufacture of cluster bombs. Giangrandi falsely stated in his expert license application that the zirconium would be used for mining explosives in Chile. Giangrandi also owned Cosmos of Livorno, Italy, the manufacturer of mini-submarines and served as President of Swisstech, Cardoen’s marketing unit.

According to a 1995 deposition by Howard Teicher, a Reagan National Security Council official, Cardoen was working for the CIA to illegally ship military hardware to Saddam. Giangrandi’s operation was part of a much larger criminal conspiracy involving agricultural loans guaranteed by the Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corporation and funded by Italy’s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). The failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) (also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International) had connections to both BNL and Ahmad Chalabi’s Petra Bank. In 1992, The Wall Street Journal reported that George W. Bush and Jeb Bush had been named as potential witnesses in the class action lawsuit brought about the clients of BCCI who had been defrauded in the bank’s collapse. During the time, George W. was involved in various failed oil companies in Houston and Jeb, operating from a base in Miami, was involved in suspicious real estate deals.

There was another Florida connection to the illegal arms shipments to Iraq. Iraqi arms dealer Ishan Barbouti worked with Iran-contra felon Richard Secord to secretly ship large amounts of cyanide from Product Ingredient Technologies, a food-flavoring factory in Florida, to Iraq for use in Saddam’s nerve gas production during the 1980s. All of these transactions involving Bayoil’s Giangrandi, Cardoen, Secord, and Barbouti, were known to President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. Between 1990 and 1991, three journalists who were investigating various aspects of Cardoen’s secretive arms trading activities were found dead in suspicious circumstances. They were freelance writer Danny Casolaro, found dead from wrist slashes in a bathtub in a Martinsburg, West Virginia hotel; Lawrence Ng, a stringer for the Financial Times, found shot to death in the bathtub of his apartment in Guatemala City; and Jonathan Moyle, a British aviation journalist found hanging in the closet of his hotel room in Santiago, Chile. Moyle had uncovered details of Cardoen’s role in the Bush 41 deal to illegally ship weapons to Iraq.

Under the Oil-for-Food program, the Saddam regime was charging a hefty surcharge per barrel of oil – money that went directly into the bank accounts of Saddam and his closest officials. According to the Democratic minority report, while French company TotalFinaElf objected to paying the surcharge, American companies like ExxonMobil and Texaco began to acquire Iraqi oil through third parties that were paying the surcharge. These third parties included Bayoil. In mid-February 2003, just weeks from the onset of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, oil tankers began loading Iraqi crude at the Iraqi port of Khor al-Amaya. The Bush administration-approved sanction-busting oil shipments involved a Jordanian company named Millenium, owned by the Shaheen Business Investment Group and a Connecticut-based shipbroker called Odin Marine, Inc.. Oil tankers were permitted to off load their oil at the UAE port of Fujairah for reshipment on larger tankers without any interference from the U.S. Navy-led Maritime Interdiction Force, set up to enforce the sanctions. Giangrandi’s company, Italtech, was involved in a number of the shipments as a U.N. contract holder (lifter).

When Iraq’s Oil Minister expressed his suspicion that the oil shipments would never get by the U.S. Navy defenses, a mysterious high-ranking visitor told him the Iraqi oil was “for the sake of the people who work for the defense of the United States. It will pass through safely.” When the unknown visitor later asked for additional oil shipments from Khor al-Amaya he assured the minister that “you will never hear about this is the press any more. The U.S. forces will make them be quiet.”

Millennium chartered seven ships through Odin. Shipping communications obtained by the committee proved that the tankers traveled with the full knowledge and acquiescence of the Maritime Interdiction Force, then under the command of a U.S. Naval Officer, Commander Harry French. The MIF permitted all the ships loading oil from Khor al-Amaya to leave the Gulf without interference. Odin became concerned about the legality of the shipments and eventually contacted U.S. State Department official Amy Schedlebauer. Two hours after Odin’s General Counsel contacted Schedlebauer, she responded in an e-mail: ‘AWARE OF THE SHIPMENTS AND HAS DETERMINED NOT TO TAKE ACTION.”

Coleman and Levin wrote a February 8, 2005 letter to Rumsfeld asking about the operations of the Maritime Interdiction Force in the Gulf prior to the war. A similafr letter was sent to the State Department inquiring about the illegal Khor al-Amaya oil shipments. To date, the committee has not received an answer from either Rumfeld or Rice.

Minority report documents indicate that one of the largest recipients of Bayoil Iraqi oil shipments was Enron, the bankrupt company that served as a virtual slush fund for the political campaigns of George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The following describe the shipments to Enron:

Bayoil Cargo #
Date loaded
Allocation Holder
Lifter
Vessel
Bank
Total bbls bought
Place loaded

B-Basra

K-Kirkuk
Purchaser from Bayoil
Amt. Purchased from Bayoil (bbls)
Saddam Surcharge

Per/bbl
Surcharge Rate

($/bbl)
Total Surcharge

($)

50111
10/26/00
ALFA-ECO
ALFA-ECO
Olympic Spirit

2,482,908

ENRON
300,000
0.10
0.10
30,000

50131
2/10/01

ITALTECH
Amazon Eagle
UEB
2,140,302
K
ENRON
535,815
0.20
0.19
101.805

50134
2/19/01

ITALTECH
Tina
UEB
2,376,927
B
ENRON
394,482
0.29
0.19
74,952


At the same time Enron Chairman Kenneth (“Kenny Boy”) Lay was involved in Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force secret dealings and when he was stuffing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pockets of George W. Bush and Cheney’s political campaign, he also managed to illegally stick $206, 757 into the pockets of Saddam Hussein and his cohorts.

The Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal also involves one of the Bush children – Dorothy “Doro” Bush Koch, sister of George W. Bush and married to Bobby Koch, reportedly a cousin member of the oil industry Koch family, owner of Koch Industries, which is also one of Bush’s largest political donors. The minority committee report indicates that Koch Industries was also a major recipient of illegal Iraqi oil and a huge source of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein:

Link Here



Bayoil Cargo #
Date loaded
Allocation Holder
Lifter
Vessel
Bank
Total bbls bought
Place loaded

B-Basra

K-Kirkuk
Purchaser from Bayoil
Amt. Purchased from Bayoil (bbls)
Saddam Surcharge

Per

bbl
Surcharge Rate

($/bbl)
Total Surcharge

($)

50136
3/12/01

ITALTECH
Olympic Breeze
UEB
1,959,234
K
KOCH
978,563
0.29
0.19
185,927

50143
5/3/01

PETROLINE (UAE)
Skyros
BBL
2,013,883
B
KOCH
489,693
0.30
0.30
146,908

50105
5/31/01

MARBEL (UK)
Zante
Paribas
1,559,776
K
KOCH
452,776
0.30
0.30
135,833

50156
7/19/01

EMIROIL
Skyros
Paribas
2,096,868
K
KOCH
504,301
0.30
0.17
83,210

50161
8/21/01
Sergei Isakov (Russian Lib. Dem. Party mbr.
ROSNEFT
Stena Convoy
CAI
1,822,670
K
KOCH
475,214
0.28
0.30
134,961

50160
8/1/01
Isakov
ROSNEFT
Stena Companion
Paribas
2,270,270
B
KOCH
523,437
0.28
0.28
148,656

50174
10/18/01
Iraqi-Austrian Soc. & Temam Shehab (Syria)
AL-HODA (UAE)
Tina
Paribas
2,022,622
B
KOCH
527,712
0.30
0.30
158,314

50174
10/18/01
Jehad Karam (Lebanon)
Primacosa (Cyprus)
Tina
Paribas
300,000
B
KOCH
524,193
0.30
0.30
157,258

50189
2/1/02
Min. of Energy (Jordan)
AL-HODA (UAE)
Stena Constellation
Paribas
902,004
K
KOCH
478,510
0.30
0.30
143,553


The total sum in kickbacks from George W. Bush’s cousin-in-laws to Saddam’s bank accounts: $1,294,620.

George Galloway was correct when he called the Coleman Committee the “mother of all smoke screens.” Major political contributors and friends of Bush not only paid illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein but personally profited from sanctions-busting with Iraq. Those involved in the scheme included individuals who date back to the Reagan/Bush 41 “cluster bombs and biological and chemical weapons-for-oil” scandal of the 1980s. Galloway is correct when he stated that there is enough evidence on Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair and their neocon advisers to park them in prison cells in The Hague for an awfully long time.

Link Here



The Enron Photo Album Link Here

Oil-for-Food Programme

US "Backed Illegal Iraqi Oil Deals" (May 17, 2005) A report released by US Senate investigators found that the US "was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions," but also occasionally "facilitated the illicit oil sales." Further, the report shows that "US oil purchases accounted for 52% of the kickbacks paid to Saddam Hussein's regime - more than the rest of the world put together." The Guardian notes that the report will likely ease pressure from conservative Republicans in Washington who want to see UN Secretary General Kofi Annan resign.

Britain "Turned Blind Eye" to Iraq Oil Smuggling (April 17, 2005) A former senior British diplomat says "there was never any concerted attempt by the UK or US" to prevent smuggling of Iraqi oil under Oil-for-Food programme sanctions. He notes that "sanctions enforcement was bottom of the agenda" and took a back seat to other diplomatic considerations. The British diplomat's statements follow Kofi Annan's assertion that the US, UK, and other Security Council members ignored smuggling of Iraqi oil to neighboring Jordan and Turkey. (Telegraph)

Link Here