Tuesday, May 20, 2003

What a surprise!
Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz at ABC report that Saddam Stole Billions From U.N.:
United Nations officials looked the other way as Saddam Hussein's regime skimmed $2 billion to $3 billion in bribes and kickbacks from the U.N. Oil-for-Food Program, said U.N. officials who told ABCNEWS they were powerless to stop the massive graft.
Hmmm, how could that be with the eagle-eyed U.N. bureaucrats on the case?
Under the program, all money from the sale of oil was supposed to go into U.N. bank accounts in New York to buy food and humanitarian supplies.

But that's not what British businessman Swara Khadir found when his company sought contracts to sell Iraqi oil. "We discovered that we had to bribe a lot of people," said Khadir. "And because it was Iraqi oil we were talking about, it was bribing top Saddam officials."

Khadir refused to go along [with the bribes], but still has the Iraqi documents instructing him in which Swiss and Jordanian bank accounts the bribe money should be deposited.

"They made no show of concealing it," he said, "because the U.N. was just turning a blind eye to it."
Ooops, I take back the "eagle-eyed" part. But they were ace U.N. bureaucrats:
To questions about whether there should have been intense scrutiny of the companies and evidence of wrongdoing, such as illegal money being funneled to Saddam, Sevan said, "We don't do that. I'm sorry."
Hmmm, let's have a big conference at a foreign resort to discuss the ramifications at length!