By Yana Amelina

09-02-04

The Baghdad newspaper al-Mada (Horizon) recently published a list of 270 organizations, businesses and individuals to whom Saddam Hussein is alleged to have given plum contracts for millions and tens of millions of barrels of oil in exchange for political support.

The list includes persons or organizations from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Sudan, China, Austria, France, Australia, Brazil, Belarus, Ukraine and, most important to us, Russia. The al-Mada list is based on documents from Saddam's own State Organization for the Sale of Oil (SOMO), several of which-photocopies of oil contracts signed by the heads of SOMO in the early 1990s and a list of recipients-were reproduced.

Russian companies, agencies and organizations listed in the Baghdad documents include the Russian government, which was said to have received 1.366 bn barrels of oil, an unnamed chief of staff of the Russian president (5 mm barrels), the Russian Foreign Ministry (31.1 mm), the administration of the Chechen Republic (2 mm), LUKoil (63 mm), Rosneft (35.3 mm), Gazprom (26 mm), Soyuzneftgaz and Yury Shafranik personally (25.5 mm), Moscow Oil Company (25.1 mm), Orenburg Oil Company (22.2 mm), Sidanco (21.2 mm), Transneft (9 mm) and a number of other companies getting lesser amounts of oil. Several Russian political parties and individuals benefited similarly, according to the Iraqi newspaper.

These included companies owned by the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), which supposedly got 79.8 mm barrels of oil, Sazha Umalatova's tiny Party of Peace and Unity (24 mm barrels), 1 mm barrels to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (while the unknown National-Democratic Party supposedly got 2 mm barrels) and 13 mm barrels of oil to Nikolai Ryzhkov, the former chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers.
Nor was there any holding back by a supposed Moscow Academy of Sciences (3.5 mm) or the Russian Orthodox Church (5 mm barrels).

The published list is rife with mistakes and garbles. For example, besides the companies already named, the list includes such allegedly Russian companies as the non-existent Zarabsneft, which is said to have received 174.5 mm barrels of oil, something called Rusneftgazexport, supposedly getting 12.5 mm barrels (specialists think this is a reference to the Gazprom subsidiary Gazexport) and, each getting 1 mm barrels, Caspian Investment Company (one supposes the newspaper meant Caspian Oil Company), Surgutneft (probably Surgutneftegaz Oil and Gas) and Siberian Oil and Gas Company (probably East-Siberian Oil and Gas Company).
Or these guesses could be wrong and the documents simply fakes: It is hard to believe that the former leadership of Iraq handed out oil without even knowing the correct names of the supposedly recipient Russian companies.

Since the average price of a barrel of oil through the 1990s was approximately $ 20, profits from these contract-“bribes” would simply have been astronomical, amounting to tens of billions of US dollars (the incredibility of these amounts offers further food for thought). According to the newspaper, an aide to Iraqi Oil Minister Abdul Sahib Kotob said the ministry is seeking restitution through the courts and Interpol in the hope of using the recovered funds in rebuilding Iraq.
This, apparently, reflects the general approach of Iraq's ruling group. “We hope, if all this is confirmed, that the foreigners who are involved will be brought to account. We are seeking to retrieve for the Iraqi people at least some of the money stolen from it,” Makhmud Osman, a member of Iraq's Provisional Governing Council, declared.

It would, however, be anything but simple to get one's physical hands on these fabulous amounts, if they, in fact, exist. The leaders of the Russian and similarly accused Ukrainian Communist Parties and the LDPR immediately denied al-Mada's assertions. Naturally, however, LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky did not miss his chance to take a swipe at the Communists, averring that they, unlike him, had taken Saddam's silver.
Father Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy chief of the Moscow Patriarchate's Department of Foreign Relations, declared that “the solidarity of our Church with the people of Iraq, expressed in the form of statements of its religious leaders and visits by our delegations to Iraq, is connected in no way, of course, with mercantile interests of any kind.”

For its part, the Information Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry said assertions about bribes from Hussein to Russian oil companies “can only be made by those completely unfamiliar with the mechanism of Iraqi oil exports in the conditions imposed by the sanctions of those times, or this is deliberate disinformation.”
As is well known, all exports of Iraqi oil were carried out within the framework of the United Nations' humanitarian “Oil for Food” program.
“The UN created the necessary control mechanism for implementing such contracts, which were made binding by independent UN controllers, not by Iraqis. Payment for the oilagain did not go to Iraqis but to a special UN account,” the Foreign Ministry commentary states.

This arrangement, approved by the UN Sanctions Committee, makes absurd the idea of receiving bribes from the government of S. Hussein. Rather, as is widely known, the Iraqi regime tried to demand payments of so-called commissions from these companies.'
“One cannot but note that the appearance of such concoctions as these 'bribes' coincides with renewed efforts by Russian companies to re-enter the Iraqi market to take part in the reconstruction of war-ravaged Iraq,” the Foreign Ministry commentary states.

That, ultimately, is the point of the al-Mada story, specialists believe. “This is a colossal provocation,” Vyacheslav Matuzov, coordinating secretary of the Society for Friendship and Business Cooperation With the Peoples of the Arab Countries, told. “Everything described in the documents published in Baghdad was absolutely legal, done within the framework of the UN Sanctions Committee and with the fullapproval of the UN. A number of Russian political figures -- and this has never been a secret -- did act as intermediaries between the oil companies and the then government of Iraq and received commissions as intermediaries for that service. Given the international isolation of the Hussein regime, this was a logical step on the part of Baghdad. Who got those opportunities was, naturally, up to the Iraqi leader. Let it be noted, however, that there is nothing criminal here and that all the funds from sales of Iraqi oil accumulated in accounts in New York.”

In the view of this Russian specialist on Arab affairs, the appearance of these “compromising” documents has as its sole purpose influencing the present Iraqi leadership in order to undermine Russian economic interests in Iraq.
“A supremely important matter is being decided at this time: Will or won't Russia take part in the reconstruction of Iraq?,” Matuzov said. “The outlook for us is anything but good. Neither Washington nor Baghdad, which is entirely under Washington's control, has any intention of allowing governments that did not participate in the aggression against Iraq to have a hand in the rebuilding. Confirmation of this has come from a variety of sources. I got an unambiguous negative answer when I asked the chairman of the Saudi Arabian Chamber of Commerce and Industry about Russia's possible participation in the reconstruction of Iraq. He said in so many words that Moscow needn't waste its time hoping for natural-resource contracts.”

It may be noted, too, that a former French minister is among those that al-Mada listed as receiving bribes and that the European media saw that as a clear sign that France is to be excluded from the reconstruction.
The Americans warned us about all this long ago. And, according to Matuzov, any attempts by Russians to build “bridges” to Baghdad over the heads of the Americans are doomed: there is no chance at all that the Provisional Governing Council can take an independent line as long as Iraq is ruled from outside, he said.

“The Arab world is today under colossal economic and political pressure,” Matuzov said. “The next few years will see the struggle shifted from the military to the economic front. Russia has to step up its activity sharply. A great deal depends on whether we can attract the Arabs' enormous capital into our country and whether we can assimilate the Arab region's mass markets. At this moment, however, Russian moves along this line are being stymied by certain government circles and a number of giant financial-oligarchic corporations that are acting in their own selfish interests without regard to national-state interests.”

According to Iraqi sources, new material “exposing” Russian “bribe-takers” is about to be published. “There is documentary evidence of hundreds of similar incidents involving various Russian and CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] organizations and individuals, including journalists,” a columnist for an influential Arab newspaper told. None of his colleagues doubts the documents' authenticity, he said.
However, he said, there is a significant difference between oil given to the LDPR and oil given to the Russian Orthodox Church. “Hussein dealt with different people differently,” he said. “In all likelihood, he simply wished to help the Russian Orthodox Church. Saddam gave money, for example, to build mosques in Jordan, but this doesn't mean that he bought the church or the local Moslems.”

Source: Rosbalt News Agency