British Parliament member denies oil-for-food role
Tuesday, May 17, 2005 Posted: 12:11 PM EDT (1611 GMT)
(CNN) -- British Parliament member George Galloway on Tuesday angrily denied profiting from Saddam Hussein's regime and criticized the Senate panel probing alleged corruption the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq.
Galloway is appearing before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which stated in a report last week that deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein granted him vouchers for 20 million barrels of oil between 2000 and 2003.
He told the panel that he never took "one thin dime" from Iraq.
"If you had any evidence of that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this commitment (committee) today," Galloway said.
Galloway, 51, who met with Saddam in the 1990s, has been a leading critic of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his alliance with U.S. President George Bush in the war with Iraq. He was re-elected on an anti-war platform earlier this month.
The Senate subcommittee, chaired by Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman, has alleged in recent days that a number of European politicians were rewarded by Saddam for supporting Iraq's bid to lift economic sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
The subcommittee alleged Galloway steered some oil allocations to a Jordanian businessman who financed a Galloway foundation that sent medical aid to Iraq.
Among other individuals implicated was former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who the panel said was allocated 11 million barrels.
"I wrote to Mr. Coleman," Pasqua told reporters Sunday, "and I told him that all allegations about myself are false."
Russian Deputy Parliament Speaker Vladmir Zhirinovsky, who was accused Monday of receiving 76 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil, denied the accusation.
"I've never signed any contract and never received a cent from Iraq," Zhirinovsky told a Russian TV interviewer.
But Coleman told CNN the evidence, derived from Iraqi oil ministry records and interviews with top Saddam loyalists in U.S. custody, is compelling.
"All we've done is report what we've found. And what we found was Iraqi documents made in a time when Saddam was in power that specifically listed these individuals by name, laid out the allocations they were given," Coleman said.
His hearing will be the 14th congressional session to date devoted to the U.N.'s oil-for-food program by the five congressional panels investigating it.
On Monday, a House Commerce Committee panel held its first hearing.
"It seems clear [that] under Saddam oil-for-food became oil-for-influence," said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who chairs the committee.
Oil ended up in the U.S.
The panels seem to agree that three-quarters of the oil Iraq was permitted to export under oil for food ended up in the United States, though U.S. firms directly purchased less than 1 percent of the crude.
A new report from Democrats on the Senate subcommittee concludes the United States ended up with a majority of the oil lifted from Iraq after vendors paid illicit surcharges of 10 cents to 30 cents a barrel to Saddam.
Investigators have estimated Saddam pocketed at least $2 billion by extorting the surcharges and kickbacks on humanitarian goods purchased.
While oil for food was operating from 1996 to 2003, Saddam got to choose the buyers of 3.4 billion barrels of oil that sold for $64 billion. The oil revenue went into a U.N.-controlled bank account that doled out funds for U.N.-approved sales of food, medicine and supplies to Iraq.
The illicit surcharges were typically wired into Iraq-controlled bank accounts in Lebanon, Oman and an Iraqi-front company in the United Arab Emirates, or paid in cash to Iraqi embassies and flown to Baghdad.
Of the $228 million in surcharged oil, the Democratic report found the United States imported 525 million barrels, or 52 percent of it. Among the biggest end users of this oil were Valero, Premcor, Alon USA, and Exxon, according to the report.
But investigators found no evidence that U.S. companies "knowingly purchased Iraqi oil on which an illegal surcharge had been paid."
U.S. company, CEO under indictment
Bayoil, which has been doing business with Iraq for 20 years, was the biggest provider of Iraqi oil to the United States, delivering more than 200 million barrels, the report said. At its peak, Bayoil lifted 20 percent of Iraqi oil shipments under oil for food and facilitated the payment of at least $37 million in illicit surcharges, according to the report.
"Bayoil then sold the Iraqi oil primarily to U.S. oil companies and refineries which, in turn, sold refined petroleum products, like gasoline and heating oil, to American consumers," the report said.
Bayoil and its CEO are under federal indictment for allegedly paying the illegal surcharges.
"Bayoil is largest intermediary we can identify by far," said Sen. Carl Levin, the subcommittee's ranking Democrat. "We assisted the delivery of oil that was inconsistent with U.N. rules."
The Democratic report found Bayoil shipped a lot of oil allocated to a company called Italtech run by Augusto Giangrandi, a sometime Florida resident with dual Chilean-Italian citizenship.
In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, Giangrandi brokered a deal whereby Bayoil paid a Chilean weapons manufacturer, Cardoen Industries, instead of Iraq for shipments of oil in order to settle a debt Iraq owed Cardoen, according to the report.
"Bayoil would lift a quantity of oil, pay Iraq only a portion of the value of the oil, and pay Cardoen the balance," the report said. "This arrangement, in effect, allowed Iraq to trade oil for cluster bombs."
Neither the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control or any other agency investigated Bayoil despite its intense lobbying efforts to keep the U.N.-set price of Iraqi oil as low as possible.
"We've got to look in the mirror at ourselves as well as point fingers at others," Levin said. |
