A Senate committee investigating the UN's oil-for-food program for Iraq estimates that during 13 years of international sanctions, former president Saddam Hussein's government made at least US$21.3 billion illicitly -- more than double previous government estimates.
Senator Norm Coleman, a Republican who is chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said at a subcommittee hearing on Monday that he doubted that fraud and abuse on this scale could have gone undetected by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan or even by senior US officials. And he said that because it was unknown where the illicit money ended up, he was worried that it may be helping to finance the insurgency in Iraq.
The UN aid program for Iraq ran from 1996 to last year, easing some of the effects of the sanctions by allowing the country to make monitored sales of oil and use the money to purchase aid like food and medicine. Since then, there has been growing evidence that Saddam's government exploited the program with a campaign of illicit oil sales, illegal surcharges and kickbacks as well as bribes aimed at lifting sanctions.
Coleman said the huge scale of fraud and theft while UN penalties were in effect had created a "dark stain" over the world organization that raised questions about whether it could put in place and monitor any sanctions.
Questions about how much money was siphoned away were particularly troubling, he added, because of allegations that Benon Sevan, who was in charge of the UN program, had benefited from special allocations of oil from Saddam.
Sevan has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
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