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In the hunt for Saddam Hussein's billions, investigators have identified five networks of more than 100 companies used to launder money skimmed from Iraqi oil sales. Saddam's gangster regime set up shell companies in Switzerland, Jordan, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Panama, according to investigators. Those company networks and their banking affiliations were used to enrich the former Iraqi strongman, his sons Uday and Qusay, and other family members. "Ultimately, the money was stolen from the Iraqi people," said Taylor Griffin, spokesman for the Treasury Department, which is heading the government's laundering probe along with U.S. Customs, the Secret Service and various...

<p>June 19, 2003 -- BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. troops raided two farmhouses near Tikrit north of Baghdad yesterday and seized millions of American dollars, British pounds, euros and Iraqi dinars apparently designated, in part, to pay bounties to kill American soldiers, a senior U.S. general said.</p>

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen won't let go of the mystery: Just where did the Cuban government get up to $3.9 billion it funneled through a Swiss bank over seven years. Was Havana simply, as it claims, banking its income from tourism and remittances that Cubans abroad send to their relatives on the island? Or was dirty money involved? Ros-Lehtinen, the Cuban-born Florida Republican, wants to know, and she has been badgering officials of the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and the U.S. Federal Reserve for answers. ''That's an awful lot of money,'' Ros-Lehtinen told The Herald. According to the latest answers...

Master Sgt. Jay Phelps and Sgt. Teresa Burroughs hold the 25-pound block of gold they discovered in their office at FOB Speicher. Staff Sgt. Jesse C. Riggin Printer-friendly version TIKRIT, Iraq (Army News Service, Feb. 7, 2006) – A unique challenge for two Soldiers arose recently with the discovery of a very special doorstop in the terrain team’s work space: a 25-pound block of solid gold. “I noticed it during the relief-in-place with the unit before us, sitting under the table in the office,” said Sgt. Teresa Burroughs, a terrain analyst in the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne...

Saddam Hussein ordered Iraq's central bank to withdraw $1 billion for his youngest son the day before the invasion to stop it falling into foreign hands, according to a leaked letter apparently written by the former dictator. In a hand-written note to the bank's governor, marked "top secret" and dated March 19, 2003, the former president told Isam Huwaish to give $920 million and 90 million euros to his son Qusay and another man, al-Mashriq newspaper reported yesterday. The Iraqi national broadsheet reproduced the letter, which appears to bear Saddam's signature. Saddam sent bank a hand-written note Employees of the...

While Microsoft giant Bill Gates hobnobs with the likes of Earth Charter architects Mikhail Gorbachev and Maurice Strong, IBM has jumped into bed with Saddam’s favourite bank, BNP Paribas. Since December 2003, IBM and French bank BNP Paribas have been in a 50-50 partnership in a massive IT operation. IBM provided the technological expertise to create BNP Paribas out of the merger of three banks and now has a subsidiary that it runs with BNP. The giant multinationals have signed up on a giant venture to manage BNP Paribas’s information and technology operations. The deal covers a kind of computing...

Audit: $9 Billion Unaccounted for in Iraq WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. occupation authority in Iraq was unable to keep track of nearly $9 billion it transferred to government ministries, which lacked financial controls, security, communications and adequate staff, an inspector general has found. The U.S. officials relied on Iraqi audit agencies to account for the funds but those offices were not even functioning when the funds were transferred between October 2003 and June 2004, according to an audit by a special U.S. inspector general. The findings were released Sunday by Stuart Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction....

Occupation authority said unable to account for $8.8 billion - The U.S. occupation authority in Iraq was unable to keep track of nearly $9 billion it transferred to government ministries, which lacked financial controls, security, communications and adequate staff, an inspector general has found. The U.S. officials relied on Iraqi audit agencies to account for the funds but those offices were not even functioning when the funds were transferred....

Defense minister threatens to arrest opponent in secret cash purchase. BAGHDAD, IRAQ – Earlier this month, $300 million in dollar bills was taken from Iraq's central bank, put into boxes and put on a charter jet bound for Lebanon, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. The money was to be used to buy tanks and weapons from arms dealers, the officials said – part of an accelerated effort to assemble an armored division for the Iraqi army. But where the money went, to whom and for what, remains a mystery. The deal appears to have been arranged outside the financial...

Moscow is shielding a former Iraqi ambassador to Russia and two top former Iraqi spies from a U.S.-led campaign to repatriate some of the billions of dollars in assets Saddam Hussein's regime stashed around the world, a senior U.S. official said. The United States, Britain and Iraq want the three men and a front company run by one of them added to a list of former Iraqi officials whose assets must be returned to the interim government in Baghdad under Security Council Resolution 1518, but permanent council member Russia won't allow it, U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary Juan Carlos Zarate told...

A detailed analysis of Saddam Hussein's secret money-laundering techniques shows here for the first time how he used the same offshore money launderers as Osama bin Laden. That covert money network, based in the tax havens of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Panama and Nassau, helped bankroll the war machines of both Iraq and al-Qaeda. More than 1,000 pages of confidential corporate, bank and legal documents show how the network functioned. The papers come from court cases filed in several European countries, from corporate records, from investigations by Italian police, from a report of the Kroll international investigative agency, and from private sources....

<p>HINESVILLE, Ga. -- He took the money. Sgt. Matt Novak admits that much. He and several fellow soldiers could not resist after discovering nearly $200 million in $100 bills sealed inside a gardener's cottage in a Baghdad palace complex last spring.</p>

KUWAIT CITY (AP) -- U.S. administrators in Iraq have frozen records of a U.N. aid program to help investigators looking into possible corruption during the Saddam Hussein era, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Saturday during a stopover in Kuwait. U.S. congressional investigators have charged that Saddam's regime amassed $10 billion through oil smuggling, illegal surcharges and kickbacks from the United Nations' 1996-2002 oil-for-food program. An Iraqi newspaper has published a list of about 270 former Cabinet officials, legislators, political activists and journalists in about 46 countries suspected of profiting from the scam. "We are concerned, deeply concerned, that money...

WASHINGTON -- Congressional investigators said today that Saddam Hussein's government reaped $10.1 billion in illegal revenues related to the United Nations' oil-for-food program -- much more than previous estimates. The findings by the General Accounting Office come as the United Nations considers expanding its investigation of allegations of corruption in the program. The oil-for-food program allowed Saddam's government to sell oil if the money was used to buy humanitarian goods and pay victims of the 1991 Gulf War. Other oil sales were prohibited under a U.N. embargo imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait. The program ended in November. The GAO had...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) -- Congressional investigators said Thursday that Saddam Hussein's government reaped $10.1 billion in illegal revenues related to the United Nations' oil-for-food program -- much more than previous estimates.</p> <p>The findings by the General Accounting Office come as the United Nations considers expanding its investigation of allegations of corruption in the program.</p>

Search for Saddam's stashed millions remains futile Press Trust of India Washington, February 20 The search for between $2 and 40 billion that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein reportedly stashed away has proven to be as elusive as the search for weapons of mass destruction. The US has recovered almost nothing of the billions Hussein and his family supposedly squirreled away after a hunt of nearly a year, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Treasury had reported Saddam's hidden funds, but nothing has been traced so far. Jeremy P Carver, a British attorney who represented Kuwait in its damage claims...

<p>BERN, Switzerland -- The United States thinks it has found at least $300 million that Saddam Hussein hid in banks, yet it doesn't have enough evidence to get countries such as Syria and Switzerland to hand over the money, U.S. and European officials said.</p>

BERN, Switzerland - The United States believes it has found at least $300 million Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) hid in banks, yet doesn't have enough evidence to get countries such as Syria and Switzerland to hand over the money, U.S. and European officials told The Associated Press. The funds at stake could go to the Iraq (news - web sites) insurgency or the country's reconstruction — depending on who gets it first. What troubles investigators more is that much of Saddam's cash may already be gone. The weak U.S. intelligence and the slow-moving investigation, now in its 11th...

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syria's president has pledged on Thursday to return Iraqi funds held in Syria after both countries agree on the amount -- put at $3 billion (2.08 billion pounds) by Baghdad. "President Bashar al-Assad assured us that the Iraqi funds in Syria are safe and that he was willing to hand them over to Iraqi authorities," Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, a member of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council, told a news conference in Damascus after meeting Assad on Thursday. Iraqi officials have said the funds in Syrian state-run banks amount to $3 billion, but their Syrian counterparts say the amount is...

<p>PARIS — Syria's Central Bank and the Medina Bank in Lebanon are holding at least $2 billion in cash, as well as gold bullion and platinum, that was smuggled out of Iraq, according to a letter written on the stationery of the Syrian army's intelligence department.</p>