Yeah, that same Annex IV has a long
list of companies funded through
Glencore International, the company
of Marc Rich, well known as Clinton’s cuckold and Scooter Libby’s client.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Oct 28 2005 12:58 utc | 3

After oil-for-food had been running for some years petro-trader and oil companies offices popped up all over the place. I’d go to my favorite pottery shop and meet a blank wall with a huge brass plaque saying LUKOIL. Then I’d run to the dentist and stare at the name tags in the lift, elevator to you guys: Mickleburst and Schmidt, P-trading (name invented.) And so on.
That was some gravy train. The trickle down was tremendous. The restaurants went crazy.
Anyway, they all stayed. More than half the petro-traders in the world are now in Geneva (I read.) And they have attracted others. The last man who grabbed my interest called himself ‘a trader’. Yikes, I thought, of what. Non ferrous metals. (Ouf.)
(It was not all due to oil-for-food, a sort of movement took hold.)
Free trade, doncha know, irrepressible. It was all business as usual, with a little twist. Most of that oil was burnt in the US.
I have been trying to recall the Swiss laws about bribery. (What follows is thus not exact.) Traditionally, in CH, bribery is admitted, allowed, and is tax-deductible, as a legitmate business expense. (Recipient must declare also.) The rationale is obvious, I need not lay it out. About 2 or 3 years ago this legislation was heavily curtailed under international pressure. I don’t know what the loopholes could have been post that change; it no longer matters, as the rule of law and int’l agreements no longer hold.
that was my bit of local color…

Posted by: Noisette | Oct 28 2005 15:56 utc | 5

AlterNet had a fine two-part story on the oil-for-food “scandal”:
Kofi and the Scandal Pimps

All of Saddam Hussein’s illicit revenues under the U.S.-led sanctions regime — the so-called OFF “corruption” — came from three sources: unauthorized Iraqi oil sales to neighboring states, dubious “inland transportation” and “post-sales service” fees, and outright kickbacks (“surcharges”). None of those funds — which are touted as evidence of an enormous U.N. “scandal” — ever actually touched the hands of United Nations personnel.
Most important, the American and British governments were the key players behind the highly flawed design that allowed Hussein to choose his contractors, and they oversaw and signed off on every bloated contract, with every bogus charge and kickback.
The right’s U.N. scandal pimps take great pains to skirt that issue. They’ve created a U.N. scandal out of sanctions violations that didn’t go through U.N. agencies, were widely reported at the time, and which the countries that have seats on the Security Council were in the best position to stop.

Iraq and Oil-for-Food: The Real Story

The other problem is one that every liberal critic of the U.N. will tell you is endemic to the institution: inadequate resources for the task. In the Committee’s first Interim Report, released in February, it faulted the U.N. for not adequately auditing the program. That’s the headline, but the details tell a bigger story. The report noted that “resources committed to auditing the program were inadequate,” and that “limited funding and staffing hampered it effectiveness.” Nonetheless, the U.N.’s “auditors were committed and diligent in the audits they performed. … In fact, the accomplishments of this small group of audit staff appear to be greater than anticipated based on their number alone.”
That is a consistent part of the real story of what happened. And despite all of these problems, the relief program was able to feed 27 million Iraqis and cut the rate of childhood death in half.
…Because the fact is, the program was set up as a honey-pot and the flies swarmed right in. That’s the story that those who care about what wrong with OFF should investigate.
We should find out why, despite the howling from many conservatives, the Bush administration has itself been accused of obstructing the investigation. We should ask: “what information don’t they want to come out?” Perhaps it has to do with at least $23.8 million dollars in contracts — and perhaps as much as $70 million worth — that Halliburton subsidiaries submitted to the Oil-For-Food program in 1998 and 1999 during Vice President Cheney’s leadership.

Posted by: OkieByAccident | Oct 28 2005 23:12 utc | 7

Don’t you think the Algerian experience of the 1990s may have been crucial for French opposition to the Iraq war. “Better Saddam than Shari’ah”?

Posted by: George Carty | Nov 7 2005 12:05 utc | 9