Oil-for-Food Inquiry Looks to the French Connection

The Financial Times ^ | April 28, 2005 | Claudio Gatti

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Charles Pasqua, a former French minister of the interior, has emerged as one of the highest-ranking targets of the widening investigations into the Iraq oil-for-food scandal.

United Nations, US and French investigators are examining Iraqi documents that show Mr Pasqua instructed officials in Baghdad to transfer lucrative oil allocations to an offshore company in order to shield him from criticism.

Mr Pasqua's alleged involvement has emerged as inquiries turn to the role of foreign governments in the corruption within the humanitarian aid programme. France and Russia, which opposed the 2003 invasion, have long been accused in the US of being too close to Saddam Hussein's regime.

Under the oil-for-food programme Iraq was permitted to sell oil for funds to alleviate shortages of medicines and other supplies created by international sanctions. The flaw in the arrangement was that the regime was able to sell allocations at below market prices to people of its own choosing.

Early on Tuesday Bernard Guillet, Mr Pasqua's diplomatic adviser, was arrested at home in Paris in connection with the inquiry, on the orders of Philippe Courroye, a French investigative judge.

Mr Pasqua has been a central figure in French politics for three decades. Once described as the man who knows all the secrets, he served twice as minister of interior, first in the late 1980s when Jacques Chirac was prime minister and again in the early 1990s.

For years French magistrates have been investigating his financial records, probing allegations that he received bribes and illicit funds generated by influence-trafficking and other activities, including arms sales to Angola.

Mr Pasqua. 78, has never been convicted of any wrongdoing. Indeed last September he won a seat in the French Senate — a position which confers immunity against prosecution — and he remains president of the RPF party.

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Heres what Denis Boyles has to say about Charles Pasqua in his book 'Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese':

Paradoxically, the enshrinement of ENA graduates as a privileged class does not mean that others are excluded from sharing in the spoils of government, provided they have what it takes to muscle their way to the trough. As a rule, what it takes is a lot of money and the clout of a big business behind you to back it up. While the énarques have more poster boys than 'N Sync, ironically one of those who best exemplifies France's ruling class is seventy-seven-year-old Charles Pasqua, a working-class stiff who has made good by playing politics with the instinctive skill of a natural-born grifter.

A former Corsican beach bum who got his start selling pastis and cigarettes, Pasqua made his way to the top tier of boozedom, becoming Ricard's international operations director in 1962. Four years later, when he met Jacques Chirac, he moved into the upper echelons of French political society with the finesse of a homeless in-law and quickly became Jacques's bag man.

Pasqua is a poorly educated thug, a source of constant embarrassment to the énarques with whom he rubs shoulders. He dresses like a bad character actor in a collection of ill-fitting suits, and he speaks French with a thick Corsican accent. He's the kind of man from whom you'd gladly buy a used car, because you know he'd kill you if you didn't. He's a living Hoffa, a godless godfather, J. Edgar Hoover without the dresses. He is vociferously anti-American, and perhaps because of that and his image as the perfect anti-énarque, when he arrived on the scene he promptly became a populist hero, playing to the same crowd of neo-fascist cranks that supported Le Pen. Chic Parisians, fond of his immigrant- and Yank-bashing rhetoric, sent him to the legislature first in 1967. By 1986, when Chirac became prime minister, Pasqua had become such a fixture of the inner circle that he was made interior minister. Pasqua became France's top cop.

This secured his position as one of the most influential politicians in France, and he quickly made his office into an instrument for inflicting trauma on those with whom he disagreed. Overnight, the Interior Ministry became very much a for-profit enterprise.

In 1988, when French hostages were taken in Lebanon, the French government allegedly paid a ransom of millions. The deal was handled by one of Pasqua's loyal underlings, Jean-Charles Marchiani, who, according to a leaked government memo, siphoned off a steep "commission" into a Swiss bank account.

In 1994, Marchiani and Pasqua brokered a deal to sell Exocet missiles to Iran in violation of international agreements, allegedly pocketing kickbacks in the deal. According to newspaper accounts, the weapons were shipped from an Algerian military base on a civilian aircraft to France, from there to Cyprus and from Cyprus to Iran.

The next year, Pasqua really got down to business.

• He played kingmaker in the presidential contest between Chirac, Lionel Jospin and Edouard Balladur: first, organizing an illegal fundraising scheme for Balladur; then, when Balladur faltered in the polls and fingered Pasqua as the bad guy, making a deal with Chirac that swung the election in his favor.

• While manipulating the presidential race, Pasqua was also busy forcing a French journalist to seek asylum in the United States after the writer linked Pasqua and Ricard to drug operations in Morroco. US authorities rushed approval for the request once it was clear to them that the man would be in danger if left to the mercy of French police.

• That same year, without consulting the Foreign Ministry, Pasqua launched the "William Lee Affair," part of a unilateral move to throw alleged CIA agents out of Paris, none of whom was named "William Lee." Lee, in reality, was a lawyer who had the misfortune of crossing paths with some of France's big-business and. political elites.

What was William Lee's sin? "The answer… ." wrote David Ignatius in the Washington Post, "appears to lie in a lawsuit Lee filed in 1993, challenging the merger of two big French companies — the arms maker Matra and the publishing giant Hachette. The suit argued that the December 1992 merger had cheated Matra shareholders because it had not taken into account a secret contract worth roughly $1.5 billion, signed the previous month, to sell Matra missiles to Taiwan."

Lee protested his innocence, and the U.5. government backed him up. His sole interest, he claimed, was to win a case and make some money.

"But to jittery government and business leaders in Paris," wrote Ignatius, "the challenge to a big French defense company appeared to be part of a broad CIA plot to undermine France's corporate interests. The French believed the CIA had helped torpedo contracts for French firms in Saudi Arabia and Brazil, and they saw the assault on Matra as another example of CIA meddling."

According to Ignatius' report, "[Lee] was summoned … to the U.S. Embassy in Paris. The embassy security officer warned him that his life was in danger and advised him to leave France immediately. When he arrived in Washington the following week, a deputy assistant secretary of state named Mark Mulvey told him to take the death threats seriously."

Uri Dan and Dennis Eisenberg of the Jerusalem Post, however, saw even more the diplomatic dustup:

For the last year and a half, [France's] most skilled commercial diplomats and businessmen have been trying to negotiate massive deals with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the Iranian mullahs under a great cloak of secrecy.

These countries are traditional French markets. The French were the major suppliers to Baghdad, enabling Saddam to build a nuclear-bomb manufacturing facility. This posed such a danger to Israel that then Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered its destruction from the air in 1981. It was also the French who nurtured and encouraged Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to return to Tehran to topple the shah. Why? To rid Iran of American influence and win lucrative deals. Jobs would be created in France, and industrial magnates would rake in vast profits… .

Both Iraq and Iran still owe the French hundreds of millions of dollars. The only way Paris can hope to get its money back is to give Iraq and Iran what they want. At the top of their shopping list is the machinery and know-how to build weapons of mass destruction, both conventional and unconventional… .

It is no secret in Western and CIA circles that the French intelligence service has been frantically trying to hide its government's Machiavellian wheeling and dealing with Iraq and Iran. Nor is it a secret that the CIA does not need its Paris staff to reveal French dealing. They get all the information they want, and more besides, from their extensive electronic surveillance system, as well as from friendly allies.

So what lies behind the French government's sudden decision to pretend that it is hot under the collar about CIA men working in Paris, particularly since Pasqua fully understands the danger of Islamic fundamentalism? The answer is simple: politics.

In France, when Pasqua pitches, politics is not le softball.

By the end of the 1990s, four different investigations were devoted to Pasqua's scams, including one for money-laundering and another for Pasqua's specialty, the weapons deal, this one involving Angola, Mitterrand's son, and Marchiani.

That's one more than the three investigations that were closing the noose on Chirac when he took office as president and immediately passed a law that made it impossible to charge sitting officials, including legislators, with corruption or any other … crime except "high treason," which in France is even worse than speaking English. The law was passed as part of the legislative package that included France's agreement to become part of the International Criminal Court in The Hague because the French invented irony. By 2003, Pasqua had moved into the big time, even" in the context of French government corruption.

In 1996, the sanctions that had been in place against Iraq since the first Gulf War were modified to allow money from the sale of Iraqi oil to be used to provide Iraqi citizens with food and medicine. The program was administered by the United Nations, who turned it over to Saddam Hussein, who was given the authority to award vouchers for oil to those who helped the regime. According to a U.S. government report released in October 2004 by chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, officials in France, Russia and China were given vouchers that could be redeemed for cash, based on the prevailing price of oil. High on the list of those named by the report was Charles Pasqua. According to a former Chirac aide, speaking to FOX News's Bill O'Reilly, Pasqua, along with other associates and business interests close to Chirac, harvested more than 75 million barrels of oil, stealing money that was supposed to have gone to the Iraqi poor. The Duelfer report also noted that Saddam had promised France access to Iraq's undeveloped oil assets as well.

After being routinely re-elected for decades, Pasqua was finally tossed out by the voters. In 2004, he lost a bid for re-election as a member of the European Parliament. Faced with joining his old friend Marchiani in prison, Pasqua called in all his chits. Just weeks ahead of a senatorial election, and with a prosecutor hot on the trail, Chirac worked together with the popular finance minister Nicholas Sarkozy to get Pasqua a seat in the French Senate. In France, Senate seats are awarded by "electoral colleges" made up of local politicians. Those apparatchiks in "Sarkoland" — the Hauts-de-Seine turf of Sarkozy — dutifully sheltered Pasqua. His five-year term expires in 2009, when, if he is still alive, he will be dutifully re-elected, perhaps joining his ally Chirac, if he's unsuccessful holding off Sarko's ambitions, as they both seek sanctuary in the great church of state, where the pews are already filled with corrupt Socialists and their ilk.

(Denis Boyles in 'Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese'; Encounter Books; pp 88-93)

[datura]

Good find - excellent post.