Comments

You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name

Your e-mail (optional)

Website (optional)

	My Original Nic Pic-a-Nic Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Foto

Submit your comments on this article

-Lurid Crime Tales-

Iraq 'oil-for-food' corruption trial opens in Paris

2013-01-23

[FRANCE24] The head of French oil giant Total and a former cabinet minister appeared in court on Tuesday on charges related to corruption in the United Nations
...where theory meets practice and practice loses...
oil-for-food programme in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Total, Chief Executive Christophe de Margerie, Swiss oil trading firm Vitol and ex-interior minister Charles Pasqua, as well as 16 other individuals, face various charges ranging from corruption to influence peddling or complicity.

The oil-for-food programme operated in Iraq between 1996 and 2003

Ten years to bring this to court? Any slower and I'd have to bet that Carla del Ponte was involved in the investigation...

and was meant to ease the suffering of the Iraqi people by allowing the country to sell some of its oil, despite the embargo imposed after the first Gulf War.

According to a U.N. report, the programme gave rise to graft on an international scale, amounting to billions of dollars.

Posted by:Fred

#5 Sudden rash of elevator accidents.

Posted by: mojo 2013-01-23 22:21

#4 Kojo get his subpoena yet?

Posted by: tu3031 2013-01-23 21:16

#3 That was the Great Age of the Chiracs.

Posted by: Fred 2013-01-23 15:41

#2 Don't know when it ended, but the Oil For Food folks were working out of the Canal Hotel in Baghdad as early as April of 1994. They definitely had a thing going and cared little about the filthy Ameericaans and their WMD inspection regimes (spit, spit, spit). And with Euro frowning emphasis and disgust....we hate you, we hate you.

Posted by: Besoeker 2013-01-23 07:58

#1 Where is Kofi in all this?

He makes Zardari lok small time.

Posted by: Bill Clinton 2013-01-23 07:44

00:00