Free Republic

Former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker used an Israeli businessman to evade American sanctions in Iraq while collecting a debt from Saddam Hussein. According to a report by WorldNet Daily reporter Aaron Klein, Baker hired Nir Gouaz, president of Caesar Global Securities in Israel, to collect a debt from the Hussein regime in 1998. Baker is a senior partner at the Houston-based law firm, Baker Botts, which made some $30 million in fees from the deal which the Israeli businessman mediated. Gouaz said the Iraqi regime owed some $1.65 billion to the Korean Hyundai Engineering firm for a series...

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...

SCATTERED AMONG the loose papers and bound files unearthed last week at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad was "letter no. 140/4/5," labeled "Confidential and Personal" and addressed to "The President's Office--Secretariat." The letter concerns George Galloway, a pro-Saddam member of the British Parliament, who founded a charity known as the Mariam Appeal, ostensibly to aid Iraqi children suffering under U.N. sanctions. The missive, from the Iraqi Intelligence Service, is a request that money be funneled directly to Galloway. It reads in part: His projects and future plans for the benefit of [Iraq] need financial support to become a motive...