What do you mean? "You in heap big trouble this time Willis?"
Posted on 10/28/2005 9:56:00 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
MOSCOW - Russian officials furiously denied allegations linking companies and politicians to corruption in the United Nations' oil-for-food program for Iraq, saying Friday that the report implicating them relied upon forgeries and false statements.
Elsewhere, the head of Sweden's AB Volvo said the company had drawn the conclusion that payments to the regime were "the way to do business in Iraq." And in Italy, a prominent politician accused in the scandal said he received "neither a drop of oil, nor a single cent."
Companies and officials from governments around the world promised to investigate accusations of massive fraud that extended to 2,200 companies and individuals involved in the humanitarian program.
Russia's objections were the strongest.
"On a number of occasions, the documents shown to us were forged, in particular, they contained fake signatures of Russian officials," Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, according to the ITAR-Tass, Interfax and RIA-Novosti news agencies.
The Independent Inquiry Committee led by Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, issued a 623-page final report on corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program. It accused companies and prominent politicians of colluding with Saddam Hussein's regime to bilk the humanitarian operation of $1.8 billion.
The investigators found that companies and individuals from 66 countries paid illegal kickbacks using a variety of methods, and those paying illegal oil surcharges came from, or were registered in, 40 countries.
The oil-for-food program, which ran from 1996 to 2003, allowed Iraq to sell limited and then unlimited quantities of oil provided most of the money went to buy humanitarian goods.
It was launched to help ordinary Iraqis cope with U.N. sanctions imposed after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But Saddam, who could choose the buyers of Iraqi oil and the sellers of humanitarian goods, corrupted the program by awarding contracts to — and getting kickbacks from — favored buyers, the report says.
Volcker's report targeted lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of Russia's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, and Alexander Voloshin, who at the time was the Kremlin chief of staff. Both have denied wrongdoing.
Zhirinovsky said the report contained "fabrications," and Interfax quoted him as repeating earlier assertions that he had never sold or bought "a drop of oil."
Other "political beneficiaries" included the British lawmaker George Galloway; Roberto Formigoni, the president of the Lombardy region in Italy; and Jean-Bernard Merimee, France's former U.N. ambassador.
Formigoni said he received "neither a drop of oil, nor a single cent."
In a statement, he said he routinely helped Italian companies obtain work with foreign governments "but the ways in which this happened are completely their responsibility."
Galloway offered a similar response, saying Thursday "I've never had a penny through oil deals and no one has produced a shred of evidence that I have."
He added: "This is all a tissue of lies and a lie doesn't become a truth through repetition."
Merimee is now under investigation in France and has denied any wrongdoing.
Interim reports in Volcker's investigation have already led to criminal inquiries and indictments in the United States, Switzerland and France, and Volcker said his team would cooperate with legal actions in following up on his findings.
Switzerland said Thursday it has launched a criminal investigation focusing on four people connected to the oil-for-food program. They were not identified.
Among companies, Volcker's team listed Sweden's AB Volvo and AWB, formerly known as the Australian Wheat Board.
According to the report, AWB was the largest single supplier of humanitarian goods under the oil-for-food program, selling 6.8 million tons of wheat to Iraq and receiving payments from the U.N. of more than $2.3 billion from 1997 to 2003. Among the companies AWB paid to transport its wheat to Iraq was Alia Transport, based in Jordan.
But Alia was partly owned by the Iraq government and payments to Alia "were tantamount to payments to the government of Iraq," the report said. Paying the Saddam regime for services was banned under the oil-for-food program, although the report acknowledged that AWB was not necessarily aware that Alia passed the money along to the Iraqi government.
"And that is that, we didn't know that the money, that we believed we were paying for transport, was being diverted to the regime," the company's managing director, Andrew Lindberg, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
The construction unit for Volvo was also implicated. The company's chief executive, Leif Johansson, acknowledged Friday that it made payments through an agent to Iraqi authorities, but said officials there had not considered the payments bribery.
"We drew the conclusion that this was the way to do business in Iraq," Johansson told Swedish news agency TT. "No one linked that to bribes."
Volvo sold its car division to Ford in 1999.
DaimlerChrysler AG was accused in at least one case of paying a $7,000 kickback to the Iraqi government and passing the cost along to the U.N. The company declined to comment because of ongoing investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.
Also implicated was Lukoil Asia Pacific, a company the report called a subsidiary of Russia's No. 1 producer, Lukoil.
Lukoil's spokesman, Dmitry Dolgov, said he had never heard of the company and questioned the authenticity of the documents used in the probe.
Dolgov noted that investigator Robert Parton resigned from Volcker's committee in April, reportedly because he believed it ignored evidence critical of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
"This creates the impression that this report is aimed at distracting attention from the oversights of U.N. officials and laying the blame with certain companies," Dolgov said.
___
Associated Press writers Mike Corder in Sydney, Australia; and Mattias Karen in Stockholm, Sweden contributed to this report.
ROFLMAO
What do you mean? "You in heap big trouble this time Willis?"
Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. , 81, founder and former chairman of Coastal Corp. exits Manhattan federal court following his arraignment, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005, in New York. The Texas oilman pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges that he conspired to pay several million dollars in illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime to win contracts through the United Nations oil-for-food program. (AP Photo/ Louis Lanzano)
You can't see it but he has his arse in a sling too..
Poor old Oscar.
Of course the #1 violator of the "Oil for Food" program is going to cry foul.
ping!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.