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Because of the hardships on Iraqi children from the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Persian Gulf War, beginning in 1996 Iraq was allowed to sell limited amounts of oil to finance the purchase of goods and medicines for humanitarian purposes. This Oil-for-Food program was supposed to be under tight UN supervision, but the UN was the fox guarding the chicken coop. The UN collected a 2.2% commission on every barrel of oil to pay for overseeing a flow of funds that totaled at least $67 billion, a task administered by 10 UN agencies employing 1,000 staff. The evidence is now pouring in that more than $10 billion in bribes and kickbacks were siphoned off under the noses of the UN monitors. Oil-for-Food was a giant scam that allowed Saddam Hussein to divert that incredible sum to finance his lavish lifestyle and to buy friends to keep himself in power. From 1996 to 2002, Oil-for-Food invited and sustained huge transfers of corruption-laden transactions between Iraq and major UN members, particularly Russia, France and China. Their profitable party would still be going on if the U.S. hadn’t kicked Saddam out of power. General Tommy Franks called the program Oil-for-Palaces. Others called it UNScam. But Saddam’s personal pocketing of an estimated $5 billion was only part of the racket; the rest of the illegal money financed a system of bribes to buy international support for his corrupt regime. Now we know why the UN, and especially France and Russia, opposed our goal of toppling Saddam. It wasn’t because they are anti-American; it was because they were the chief beneficiaries of these secret deals with Saddam and they didn’t want to turn off the money spigot. Here is how the scam worked. Saddam selected individuals, corporations and political parties to receive oil allotments at steep price discounts, which were then sold at the market price. Their part of the deal was to kick back a generous percentage of the profits to Saddam and to help keep him in power by giving him political support in the UN and elsewhere. The Iraq Oil Ministry has now released a list of 270 companies and politicians from 46 countries, especially Russia and France, that profited from this scheme. The list includes former Iraqi officials, a former French Cabinet minister, a British member of Parliament, UN Assistant Secretary General Benon Sevan who ran the program, a company with which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s son was associated, and other UN personnel who were supposed to monitor the contracts. Five investigations of what is probably the biggest financial fraud in history are now in progress, including one authorized by the UN and headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. A UN Security Council resolution calls on the 191 UN countries “to cooperate fully,” but much cooperation is unlikely since Volcker has no subpoena power. |
