Report: Iraq Aides Knew of Bribes
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Fox News
WASHINGTON — Saddam Hussein and his government bribed Russian officials, paying them millions of dollars in Iraqi oil allocations, as part of the Oil-for-Food program, a congressional investigation concluded.
The payments were made so that Iraq could buy support for lifting sanctions against Iraq in the U.N. Security Council, former Saddam officials told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs investigations subcommittee.
Saddam's vice president, Taha Yasin Ramadan, told investigators that the allocations were compensation for support, according to one of two reports released Monday.
The Senate subcommittee holds a hearing Tuesday into the allegations that Saddam spread billions in bribes and kickbacks to buy support in Russia and other governments around the globe.
The hearing will examine Saddam's use of oil vouchers, which allowed the bearer to buy Iraqi oil at cut-rate prices and could be sold for a profit. Saddam also demanded kickbacks from the oil transactions.
This is the way Saddam used oil-for-food to line his own pocket and to curry political favor, said subcommittee chairman Norm Coleman, R-Minn.
Russia's foreign ministry declined comment on the reports. It said it would be unethical to make any statements until a U.N.-appointed commission investigating the Oil-for-Food program releases its third and likely final report this summer.
The Senate investigators said their interviews and documents from the former Iraqi government add to evidence in previous probes linking Russian officials to abuses in the $64 billion U.N. program. It was designed to permit Saddam to sell some oil and use the proceeds to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian items.
Among the officials implicated are Alexander Voloshin, former chief of staff to President Vladimir Putin, and ultranationalist Russian lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Zhirinovsky denied wrongdoing. He told Ekho Moskvy radio that he never received money from Iraq or from companies that bought oil from Saddam Hussein's government.
Mikhail Troyansky, deputy chief of Foreign Ministry's information department, said Russia has cooperated with the U.N. commission's investigation, which is led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.
Documents released by Coleman's subcommittee last week claimed former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and British politician George Galloway also accepted allocations, charges both men deny.
Galloway has said he will appear at Tuesday's hearing to defend himself. He was flying to Washington on Monday.
In Paris, Pasqua said he was caught up in the crossfire of what he described as an American campaign against France.
I have never been to Iraq, I have never met Saddam Hussein. I have never received anything from the Iraqis, in any domain, he said at a news conference. He said he is ready when the time comes to talk to the U.S. Senate committee.
Coleman said he has not reached any conclusion about whether U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan should have been aware of the abuses of vouchers, but the senator renewed his call for Annan to resign. It's a matter of accountability, he said.
The latest report by the subcommittee deals with allocations given to Zhirinovsky, Voloshin and Sergey Issakov, an aide to Voloshin. Investigators said they interviewed 16 former Iraqi officials, but they identified only Ramadan and Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister.
The report said the Russian Presidential Council, led by Voloshin, received allocations worth more than $16 million, according to Iraq's oil ministry.
The subcommittee said Zhirinovsky got allocations worth $8.7 million. On six occasions, investigators said, he sold allotments to the Texas oil company Bayoil, whose owner, David B. Chalmers, has been indicted on charges related to the oil-for-food scandal.
The panel's report said about 30 percent of the oil sold in the oil-for-food program was allocated to Russia, even though Russia is an oil-exporting country.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.