May 17, 2005
French Senator Rebuts Report by U.S. Panel in Oil Inquiry
By CRAIG S. SMITH 
PARIS, May 16 - Charles Pasqua, a French senator implicated in the Iraqi oil-for-food abuse scandal, accused American investigators on Monday of a deliberate attempt to link France's political decisions before the current war in Iraq to reports of bribes paid by Saddam Hussein.
Probably, they think I am close to Jacques Chirac and that I am his adviser, Mr. Pasqua told reporters on Monday, referring to allegations reiterated last week by the United States Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that he received lucrative oil contracts from Mr. Hussein. He repeated past denials that he had received anything.
Mr. Pasqua, a former French interior minister who broke with Mr. Chirac in 1998, bristled at being portrayed as a traitor to the United Nations, which administered the program under which Iraq was permitted to sell limited quantities of oil and use the proceeds to purchase food, medicines and other goods despite strict sanctions. Mr. Hussein used the program to distribute rights to purchase oil at below-market prices to people he thought could influence international opinion on Iraq.
While Mr. Pasqua's name appeared in Iraqi Oil Ministry documents as one of the recipients of those rights, he insisted that he never visited Iraq, never discussed oil with the Iraqis and never instructed anyone else to do so on his behalf. If my name appears in certain Iraqi documents, that can only be the result of fraudulent behavior on the part of certain people who have used my name, he said.
In fact, the evidence presented in the Senate report makes clear that the oil allocations designated for Mr. Pasqua were negotiated by one of his advisers at the time, Bernard Guillet, whom Mr. Pasqua portrayed last week as someone assigned to his staff by the French Foreign Ministry.
The report states that when the Iraqis asked Mr. Guillet for a letter from Mr. Pasqua, Mr. Guillet was unable to obtain one. According to the evidence presented in the report, the Swiss company Genmar took the oil that investigators say was allocated to Mr. Pasqua.
Mr. Pasqua pointed out that the oil allocations in his name, totaling 11 million barrels, stopped in December 2000 when allocations to Mr. Guillet began. French authorities arrested Mr. Guillet in April in connection with abuses under the oil-for-food program.
Mr. Pasqua asserted that the Senate report was filled with factual errors. He said, for example, that he did not meet the former Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, in the United States as the report says.
He called for an investigation into where the money from such oil sales went, and said he had asked France's Senate to establish its own commission to investigate the allegations against him.
They should follow the money, he said during an interview last week, adding that neither he nor his supporters had received anything from the oil-for-food program.