April 20, 2004

The U.N.'s blood money. "The U.N. began the Oil-for-Food program after the first Gulf War to provide humanitarian relief for the people of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was to sell Iraqi oil, two-thirds of the proceeds of which would be used to buy food and medicine, generate electricity, build houses and help the country recover. The U.N. would get a 2.2% fee on each barrel of oil sold. But with Saddam running the program and the U.N. only pretending to pay attention, corruption quickly dominated the process. Saddam added a 20-cent kickback fee to every barrel sold, which soon became 30, then 50 and finally 70 cents a barrel. Add to that the profit from Iraqi oil smuggled to Syria, Turkey and Jordan, and kickbacks on the humanitarian materials shipped into Iraq, and Saddam was raking in as much as $2.5 billion each year in illicit revenue to build up his military, his palaces and his power. The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates Saddam's total illegal revenues from the Oil-for-Food program to have totaled more than $10 billion. Why would the U.N. delegate total, unsupervised authority to run the program to Saddam? Perhaps because Iraq and the other nations whose companies were participating in the scam didn't want appropriate procedures and controls applied to their ventures. Teresa Raphael, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe, has seen a spreadsheet listing the companies Saddam had approved for oil purchases. It included 11 French middleman concerns, (150 million barrels sold to them), 14 companies in Syria (120 million) and dozens of Russian firms (more than a billion barrels), the president of Indonesia, the Palestine Liberation Organization, "the director of the Russian president's office" and former French foreign minister Charles Pasqua. Most stunning is Benon Sevan, the U.N.'s assistant secretary-general, whom his boss, Kofi Annan, designated to run the Oil-for-Food program. Mr. Sevan was allocated 14 million barrels of oil and disposed of 7 million of them. As all this information became public over the past year or so, U.N. lawyers refused to allow identification of the kickback firms; it was, they said, "privileged information which could not be made public." Mr. Annan then suggested "an independent high-level inquiry" to clean up the U.N.'s sordid image. Absolutely not, said France's U.N. ambassador, Jean-Marc de la Sabiliere, for the U.N. Iraqi accounts were managed by a French company, BNP Paribas .. ". More on "Oil-for-Food" at the U.N.. UPDATE: Wat it Oil-for-Terror? Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack