Free Republic

UK'S GEORGE GALLOWAY REFUTES NEW OIL SCANDAL CLAIMS Mon Oct 24 2005 19:52:44 ET George Galloway has strongly refuted new allegations that he pocketed money from Saddam Hussein's scandal ridden oil-for-food programme and lied about it under oath. The US Senate committee investigating the Respect MP's alleged involvement in the saga claims to have discovered £85,000 (150,000 dollars) in Iraqi oil money in his wife's bank account. Mr Galloway may face criminal charges if found to have given false testimony to the committee when he defended himself against similar claims in a passionate showdown earlier this year. The Senate Permanent...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Things are getting very grim here in Washington. The Democrats are fighting a desperate rear-guard action against the Republicans on several fronts. They are fighting to maintain their death grip on federal judicial appointments. They are resisting Social Security reform. They are using every expedient to scandalize the president's designated UN ambassador, John Bolton. This is not a constructive use of power, for the Democrats have no constructive proposals to advance. It is merely a grim assertion of "no" to the political party now controlling the White House and Capitol Hill. That is why I, as a...

George Galloway conceded last night that intermediaries in his fund-raising activities could have siphoned off money from Saddam Hussein - but insisted he had never done so. As the Labour MP fought to counter allegations that he received up to £375,000 a year from the Iraqi regime, Mr Galloway revealed the full amount given to the Mariam Appeal - the organisation he founded to fly a young Iraqi leukemia victim to Britain for medical treatment and which then became a campaign against Iraqi sanctions - and pledged to release further figures today. Speaking to the Guardian from his holiday home...

MP's wife introduced him to Saddam sympathiser, writes CAMERON SIMPSON and AARON HICKLIN GEORGE Galloway first met the shadowy figure of Fawaz Zureikat through his Palestinian wife. The fateful meeting was to propel the man who goes under the soubriquets of "Gorgeous George" and the "MP for Baghdad Central" into one of the biggest crises of his colourful career. Dr Amineh Abu-Zayyad, 36, a Jerusalem-born scientist who married Mr Galloway in a secret ceremony in London in February 2000, had gone to the same university in Jordan as Mr Zureikat. Mr Zureikat's name first surfaced in a letter from Mr...

Fawaz Zureikat, George Galloway's Jordanian partner who claims not to be involved in oil deals, is closely associated with a company that has traded Iraqi crude valued at millions of pounds, according to United Nations documents seen by The Daily Telegraph. Mr Zureikat has dismissed as a "forgery" an Iraqi intelligence report identifying him as the front man for Mr Galloway's secret contracts to buy Iraqi crude and sell humanitarian supplies under the UN's oil-for-food programme. The Jordanian businessman has repeatedly insisted that he does not deal in oil, although he does sell food and other civilian supplies to Iraq....

A Jordanian business man, Fawaz Zureikat, whose name was revealed yesterday as an allegedly business intermediary between Labour member of Parliament George Galloway and Saddam Hussain's regime, has been detained in Amman. George Galloway MP, a familiar face to Arab public, is at the top of the news once again, but this time as having been, allegedly, on the pay-roll of Saddam Hussain's regime, at least since 2000. The allegations, claimed to have been uncovered in "secret documents" found by a reporter in two charred boxes at the first floor of the looted foreign ministry in Baghdad are many and...

From leaky roofs to secret agents: how the files I found in Iraq's looted foreign ministry cast light on the paranoid world of Saddam Hussein How many Iraqi officials does it take to fix the leaky roof of a diplomat's house in London? How long does a skilled translator need to convert one of George Galloway's parliamentary speeches into Arabic? In almost 1, 000 pages of Arabic prose, each stamped with the Eagle crest of Iraq, the files found inside the foreign ministry in Baghdad cast a somewhat surreal light on the questions that turned the bureaucratic wheels of Saddam...

George Galloway, the Labour backbencher, received money from Saddam Hussein's regime, taking a slice of oil earnings worth at least £375,000 a year, according to Iraqi intelligence documents found by The Daily Telegraph in Baghdad. A confidential memorandum sent to Saddam by his spy chief said that Mr Galloway asked an agent of the Mukhabarat secret service for a greater cut of Iraq's exports under the oil for food programme. He also said that Mr Galloway was profiting from food contracts and sought "exceptional" business deals. Mr Galloway has always denied receiving any financial assistance from Baghdad. Asked to explain...