Posted on 06/14/2005 2:42:33 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
For Baghdad, the oil-for-food trade "was a way for Saddam Hussein's government to get illegal money," says Abdul Mostafa, Iraq's current ambassador to Russia. "Saddam hoped it would also be a way to buy influence in places like Russia, as well as France and China. ... Whether he was successful is the question for the investigators." Russia received one-third of all oil allocations under the U.N. program.
Mr. Mostafa says the embassy played a central role in funneling money to the Hussein regime. "There was an elaborate system here of bypassing the U.N. sanctions," he says. The embassy's oil-for-food dealings were described last month in a U.S. Senate panel report, based on interviews with Iraqi officials, including Tariq Aziz, Iraq's former deputy prime minister. American investigators allege that as much as $90 million in illegal kickbacks was funneled through the embassy between 2000 and mid-2002, when Mr. Hussein discontinued the surcharge system.
...
The allegations of cash kickbacks are "all legend, just like the legend that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," says Sergei Isakov, head of Russian Engineering, a company that figured prominently in the Senate report and allegedly accepted Iraqi oil on behalf of Mr. Putin's former chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin. Mr. Voloshin denies that he or any of his administration had anything to do with the oil trade.
...
The former Iraqi ambassador to Russia, Abbas Qunfuz, allegedly helped select many of the Russian recipients and oversaw all of the oil-for-food business, U.S. investigators and current embassy employees say. Mr. Qunfuz, who is now living in Moscow and has declined to help in the inquiry, couldn't be reached for comment.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Quote:
The allegations of cash kickbacks are "all legend, just like the legend that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," says Sergei Isakov
Me:
Perfect excuse, and reason to suspect even more, that Russia helped Saddam dispose of the WMD... Russia knew that if we were to go in and oust Saddam, their involvement in the oil for palaces scam would be uncovered. Now they can just brush it off using the "BUSH LIED!" mantra.
ping
Ping
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The St. Petersburg
Times
#1074, Tuesday, May 31,
2005
OPINION
The Mysterious Mr. Isakov
By Vladimir Pribylovsky
Recently, the Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs subcommittee on
investigations of the U.S. Senate essentially
accused Russia of receiving bribes from
Saddam Hussein in exchange for lobbying for
the Iraqi dictator's interests in the UN
Security Council. Moreover, the congressional
investigators announced they had discovered
that Iraq handed over around 90 million
barrels of oil to Putin's presidential
administration. This oil, they claimed,
brought the administration almost $3 million.
The subcommittee's report named two
figures in connection with these transfers:
Alexander Voloshin, who was President
Vladimir Putin's chief of staff at the time, and
Voloshin's "close friend," a certain "Sergei
Issakov." This Issakov, according to the
report, was Voloshin's trusted confidant and
envoy who also worked in the presidential
administration.
Voloshin responded to the assertions about
his so-called friend by insisting that, "no
person of this kind ever worked in the
administration of the president. He was never
my friend or my envoy, if he even exists at
all. I have no idea who this person is."
So, who is this mysterious Sergei Isakov,
whose last name is unlikely to contain a
double "s"? To all appearances, the
investigators had the following man in mind,
though he never worked in the presidential
administration, or at least not officially. It is
unclear if he ever had any relation to
Voloshin. But he did have a connection to oil
and to Hussein's lobbyist, Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, the head of the Liberal
Democratic Party, or LDPR.
Let's take a brief look at Isakov's biography.
He was born in the town of Mtsensk in the
Oryol region in 1961. He graduated from the
Arkhangelsk Naval School and the All-Soviet
Legal Correspondence School. Starting in the
late 1980s, he got involved in commercial
business in the Oryol region, and then in
1991 he became the vice-president of
Oryol-Avia airlines.
The year 1993 saw the first direct elections
for the head of the Oryol regional
administration. The front-runner in the
election was the former first secretary of the
Oryol regional party committee and the
former agriculture secretary of the Soviet
Central Committee, Yegor Stroyev. He was
running against a Yeltsin protege, Nikolai
Yudin.
Isakov's company, Oryol-Avia, paid for a
20-minute film promoting Stroyev, titled "The
Leader." In April 1993, Stroyev won by a
landslide, taking 52.9 percent of the vote,
while Yudin garnered 34.2 percent.
Delighted, Isakov bragged about his
accomplishment left and right, claiming that
Stroyev should thank him personally for
becoming governor.
Soon afterward, Isakov's company had its
registration revoked, and in December 1993
Isakov was arrested and charged with
financial misconduct.
No one really knows exactly what happened
between Stroyev and Isakov. Maybe Stroyev
was not pleased that a local businessman had
tried to capitalize on his electoral victory. Or
perhaps, on the contrary, the federal
authorities whose plans were thwarted by
Stroyev's win decided to do a number on his
big campaign sponsor. Or maybe Isakov was
indeed guilty as charged and was ratted on
by some competitor.
Whatever the case, Isakov was jailed for a
while but then released. His relationship with
Stroyev soured soon after that.
Isakov joined Zhirinovsky's LDPR and
became the party's regional coordinator. He
ran unsuccessfully for a State Duma seat in
1995, losing to Communist Alexei Zotikov. In
1996, he acted as Zhirinovsky's personal
envoy during the presidential election. He
made an attempt to get onto the
gubernatorial ballot in Oryol in 1997, but the
election commission, which likely answered
to Stroyev, refused to register his candidacy.
This rejection sent shock waves all the way to
Moscow. The entire LDPR Duma faction
caused a major stir in October 1997 by
getting up and leaving the legislature in
protest of the commission's decision.
Isakov did not turn up in the limelight again
until 1999, when he became the deputy
general director of the Rosavia Consortium,
an industrial and financial corporation.
In the same period, he joined the board of
directors at Nafta-Moskva, a Moscow-based
oil company. That same year, he tried again
to make it into the Duma on the LDPR ticket,
but failed once more.
The head and co-owner of Nafta-Moskva,
Suleiman Kerimov, whose company became
one of the biggest sponsors of the Liberal
Democrats about the same time, was elected
to the Duma in 1999, and then again in 2003.
The other Nafta-Moskva co-owner, Akhmed
Bilalov, was also elected to the Duma as part
of the pro-Putin party, Unity. He was
re-elected in 2003, this time as a member of
United Russia, of course.
It is amusing that Zhirinovsky, a rabid
Russian nationalist and patriot despite his
Jewish roots, was happily sponsored by two
Muslim oil magnates from Dagestan.
As a rule, sponsors in Russia do not donate to
political parties out of personal conviction or
political sympathies. They are marching to
the beat drummed by the Kremlin. Those who
ignore this rule will face a fate similar to that
of former Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
But let's get back to Iraqi oil and Hussein.
Isakov opened a business in Iraq, the
Russian Engineering Company, and traded
equipment and machinery for oil as part of
the UN oil-for-food program. He told
Vedomosti that his activities were completely
legal.
In the end, God only knows if Voloshin
actually received oil from Hussein. And no
one knows for sure if and how Zhirinovsky
and Isakov were involved in the alleged
deal.
The U.S. investigators could have gotten their
story mixed up, of course. Just the way they
got confused about whether Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction, for instance.
But perhaps the folks at Nafta-Moskva might
have been able to enlighten the senators as
to who exactly the mysterious Mr. Issakov
was and what his role in the oil deals with
Hussein was.
Vladimir Pribylovsky is president of the
Panorama think tank. He contributed this
comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
More opinion stories:
Better to Do Nothing Than Miscued Reforms | Tattoo Nation |
Something to say? Write to the Opinion
And there have been articles and reports that Russia helped Saddam get rid of his WMD. hmmmm
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1417229/posts
Saddam's Aides: Singing 'Like a Canary'(Newsweak)
msnbc - newsweek ^ | June 13 2005 | -Mark Hosenball
Posted on 06/05/2005 9:40:25 PM PDT by Deetes
June 13 issue - Some of Saddam Hussein's most notorious former lieutenants have been dishing dirt. Senate investigators looking into prewar U.N. Oil-for-Food deals have named Saddam's former personal secretary and security chief, Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti, former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan and former foreign minister Tariq Aziz as key witnesses who have provided inside info about Saddam's regime.
Senate staffers traveled to Baghdad earlier this year to interview Iraqi officials, and their reports are among the first official accounts of what captured Iraqi leaders are saying. "In interview after interview, the officials were generally forthcoming and quite proud—even boastful—of their creativity in undermining U.N. sanctions," says Sen. Norm Coleman, who leads one of several congressional probes into Saddam-era oil deals. According to Senate documents, Ramadan is one of the most talkative captives, supplying pithy quotes about how Saddam allegedly manipulated the prewar oil program to buy support from influential foreigners. Senate investigators quote Ramadan saying that Saddam's regime gave foreigners oil allocations—which could be cashed in for lucrative brokerage fees—as "compensation for support." Al-Tikriti told investigators the former Iraqi leader and his aides "were all extremists" on the issue of oil sales to Israel. If they found an Iraqi oil buyer was selling to Israel, they would "not allow it," al-Tikriti said
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