| Submit your comments on this article |
| International-UN-NGOs |
| Saddam's Oil Vouchers Revisited |
| 2004-10-28 |
| From MEMRI, an article by Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli, Senior Analyst of MEMRI's Middle East Economic Studies Program The Iraqi daily Al-Mada ("Horizon") was the first newspaper to publish a list of 270 individuals and organizations that benefited from oil vouchers granted to them by the regime of Saddam Hussein. The intention of the grant was either to allow the recipients to sell the vouchers to intermediaries for a quick profit or to buy the oil themselves at discounted prices. It was assumed that the vouchers would permit their ultimate bearer to purchase Iraqi oil at a sufficiently discounted price as to leave a margin of profit to the voucher beneficiary, the intermediary, the oil company which ultimately lifted the oil and, in some instance, to the regime itself in the form of surcharges or kickbacks that it levied on Iraqi oil exports. Al-Mada differentiates between "end-users" and "not-end users," the latter term referring to voucher recipients who had no refineries and, in many instances, were not in the oil business to start with. According to Al-Mada, its list is limited "to non-end users and to intermediary companies." It is this list in Al-Mada that has triggered multiple investigations. The Duelfer Report and the Vouchers Based on a thorough examination of the data at Iraq'sMinistry of Oil and its marketing arm, the State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO), the Duelfer Report, released in September 2004, has pieced together a complete list of oil vouchers granted by the Saddam regime during the entire life of the Oil for Food Program beginning with the first phase of the program in 1996-7 and ending with the thirteenth and last phase, which ended with the fall of the regime. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #1 Good article, Mike. Thanks! I haven't gone back to MEMRI in a while -- I get too depressed reading the vicious, raving idiocies of the lunatics. So I really appreciate that you're willing to do it, and pick out the important bits. Here at Rantburg there is the leavening of dancing houris and Arafat's lastest travails to keep me feeling perky ;-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2004-10-28 10:19:44 AM |