A Houston oilman and two traders from Texas and England paid millions of dollars in secret kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, cheating the United Nations oil-for-food program out of humanitarian aid funds, authorities said Thursday. David B. Chalmers, owner of Bayoil (USA) Inc., and Ludmil Dionissiev, a Bulgarian citizen and permanent U.S. resident, were arrested Thursday morning at their homes in Houston. U.S. Attorney David N. Kelley said he will seek extradition of defendant John Irving from England. Kelley called two indictments unsealed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan "two more pieces in the oil-for-food puzzle." He added: "It's a broad and large investigation. ... We're going to wring the towel dry." One indictment accused the three defendants were accused of paying millions of dollars in kickbacks so Houston-based Bayoil and another Chalmers company, Bayoil Supply & Trading Limited, based in Nassau, Bahamas, could continue to sell Iraqi oil under the oil-for-food program. The kickbacks, between mid-2000 and March 2003, involved funds otherwise intended for humanitarian relief, Kelley said. Kelley said $100 million would be "a conservative estimate" of the value of the oil the defendants dealt with.
A second complaint charged Tongsun Park, a South Korean citizen, with conspiracy to act in the United States as an unregistered government agent in the Iraqi effort to create the oil-for-food program. If convicted of the charges, Chalmers, Irving and Dionissiev each could face a maximum of 62 years in prison and a maximum fine of $1 million. Park could face up to five years in prison. The defendants could also be ordered to make restitution.
| Tongsun Park is still around and in business? And he still hasn't gotten around to registering as a foreign agent? |
| Now that an American has been indicted, the NYT will finally move the Oil-for-Food scandel to page 1 -- without mentioning Kofi and Koko, of course. |