oil for food. the Kofi Annan and french connection

[bodypilot90 0]

it seems the plot thickens.... if it walks like a duck.


***— As investigations proliferate into the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal, one of the more intriguing mysteries involves a former French diplomat with a direct link to the U.N.’s executive suite: Jean-Bernard Merimee .

The 68-year-old Merimee, one of several individuals now under investigation in France for alleged involvement in Saddam Hussein’s Oil-for-Food scams, is well known for his role in the early 1990s as French ambassador to the United Nations. What investigators have not so far highlighted is that during the period Merimee is alleged to have come into commercial contact with Saddam’s regime, starting in December 2001, he was working not for the French government, but as a special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (search).

Merimee’s name first surfaced in relation to Oil-for-Food (search) early last year, with the publication in Baghdad’s Al-Mada newspaper of a long list of politicians and businessmen worldwide alleged to have received lucrative oil allocations from Saddam, which could be resold to commercial dealers for an easy profit.

His name turned up again last fall, with the release of a report by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, in an annex containing what senior U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer (search) described as “secret lists” maintained in Baghdad by senior officials of Saddam’s regime.

On these lists, the apparent mention of Jean-Bernard Merimee, transliterated from Arabic as “Mr. Jan Mirami [French]” turned up three times, noted as having been allocated 4 million barrels of oil during the last three of the U.N. program’s 13 six-month phases — a stretch beginning Dec. 1, 2001 and truncated in March 2003 when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam.

Did Merimee even know he was on the Saddam regime’s secret list of oil beneficiaries?

According to the Duelfer report, the allocations linked to Merimee’s name were “not performed.” The Duelfer report does show the Merimee allocations linked to an oil trading company, French-based Aredio Petroleum, which also appears in the report as the alleged intermediary for a number of deals with other parties, in which oil was lifted. These include oil allocations to the Iraqi-French Friendship Society, as well as a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zurequat, sometime business partner of British parliamentarian George Galloway — whose name also appears on the Al Mada and Duelfer lists, but who has denied receiving any oil allocations from Iraq.

Nonetheless, the Merimee-Saddam connection could spell yet more trouble for Secretary-General Annan, who from 1997-2003 presided over the management of Oil-for-Food, and is already close to the scandal on several fronts.

His son, Kojo Annan, worked for a company hired in 1998 by the U.N. Secretariat to inspect Oil-for-Food imports into Iraq. Annan’s handpicked head of the Oil-for-Food program — former Under Secretary-General Benon Sevan, now a $1-per-year U.N. “adviser” — is under criminal investigation in New York state and has been censured for a “grave and continuing conflict of interest” by the U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food, which is expected to issue further findings about him shortly.

Earlier this month, another of Annan’s special advisers — Maurice Strong, who also held the senior rank of Under Secretary-General and was Annan’s personal envoy to North Korea — departed the United Nations pending clarification of his ties to Tongsun Park, a South Korean charged by the U.S. attorney with accepting millions of dollars from Saddam’s regime to lobby U.N. officials.

Now comes the French investigation into Merimee, who was hired by Annan in 1999 to work “as needed” as “Special Adviser of the Secretary-General for European issues.” Merimee served from 1991-1995 as French ambassador to the United Nations, and then as French ambassador to Italy.


rest of the story here

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,163984,00.html

[AlexCrowley 0]

What I say next has nothing to do with conspiracy......

Fox news has a similar reputation in the US as the Telegraph does in the UK for giving exclusive reports based on intelligence made available.

Now, I have no interest or care if this is true or not. I can only talk about the George Galloway 'intelligence' that smeared him, and judging from the physical evidence made availabe it was, to say the least, questionable. Perhaps it was a copy of an original report (but then, that would make it completely worthless if we follow recent news).

Maybe I find villification of the french in general distasteful, which is odd cos I'm English and we HATE the french, more the the Americans, so much so that we never felt the need to change the name of our fries, but we did have that whole 100 year war thing.

Plus they're french.

Anyway, villification - umm yeah, the intelligence on the whole iraq stuff isnt really considered pristine or valid on the whole except by the CIA and Mi6, after all - they'd know, they wrote it

TV's got them images, TV's got them all, nothing's shocking.