Bribing Saddam Hussein for oil contracts in Iraq is no longer necessary now that the US has control of that country.
Texas oil tycoon David Chalmers Jr, his oil company Bayoil of Texas, and Bayoil Supply & Trading Ltd, based in the Bahamas, face federal criminal charges as part of the scheme to pay millions of dollars in secret kickbacks to Iraq. The indictment charges that the bribes were paid so the Bayoil companies could sell Iraqi oil under the UN program. Also charged in the plot were Ludmil Dionissiev, a Bulgarian trader living in Houston, and John Irving, a British oil trader, according to the indictment unsealed in the US District Court in Manhattan.
Now that UN Secretrary General Kofi Annan has been cleared of wrongdoing over the Iraq Oil for Food program, the truths behind the scandal are beginning to be revealed.
Interestingly enough, Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector in Iraq received $400,000 between August 2000 and June 2001 from Michigan real estate developer Shakir Al Khafaji for a documentary film he was making to show how the inspection effort had successfully disarmed Saddam Hussein. A month after the money was given to Ritter, Khafaji showed up on the list of UN Oil for food program oil voucher recipients for the first time, selling a little more than 2 million barrels of oil for a profit of nearly $1 million. The oil was sold through a middleman to Bayoil, David Chalmer’s company, according to a joint investigation by the Financial Times newspaper and an Italian business journal.
I think politics and corporations are knit together too closely. It makes it difficult to be a powerful politician and not have any conflicts of interest. Politics is merely just a layer on top of corporations to increase a corporation’s power; and as a result greedy corporations benefit from political decisions. It’s unfortunate, but this is our world.
Los Angeles Times Article
BBC News Article