A US Senate committee has disclosed evidence that it says shows senior Iraqi officials under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein awarded the right to buy millions of barrels of Iraqi oil to Charles Pasqua, the former French interior minister, and to George Galloway, a recently re-elected member of the British parliament.
The evidence is contained in a report with previously undisclosed Iraqi documents and excerpts from interviews with former Iraqi officials. It was issued on Wednesday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
The report concludes that the rights were given to Pasqua and Galloway because of their support for Saddam, but contains no copies of bank statements or other evidence indicating that either man directly solicited Iraqi oil or benefited financially from the rights.
"This report exposes how Saddam Hussein turned the oil-for-food program on its head and used the program to reward his political allies like Pasqua and Galloway," said Republican Senator Norm Coleman, the chairman of the subcommittee.
The report and its findings, prepared and endorsed by the panel's majority and minority members, contain Iraqi material backing the panel's contention that Iraqi officials thought they were rewarding the two men for their support. Galloway and Pasqua denied any wrongdoing. A spokeswoman for Pasqua said he "continues to deny that he has made any money whatsoever in the oil-for-food program."
Galloway, calling the accusations "Groundhog Day again," said: "I have never traded in a barrel of oil, or any vouchers for it. I have never seen a barrel of oil."
He added, "And no one has acted on my behalf."
The report said the Iraqi officials who awarded the rights believed they were giving the rights to the two men, according to the official Iraqi documents and interviews that the panel staff conducted with arrested former Iraqi officials.
Iraqi oil ministry records and letters from senior Iraqi officials indicate, for instance, that Pasqua, who was France's interior minister from 1993 to 1995 and is a member of the French parliament, was granted rights to buy 11 million barrels of oil from June 1999 through December 2000, the report says. A June 1999 letter from the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organization to Iraq's oil minister says Saddam personally approved the right for Pasqua to buy 3 million barrels.
The panel also concludes that Pasqua tried to hide his right to buy oil for "political reasons" by having his agent, Bernard Guillet, insist that a Swiss company pump the oil, rather than a French company, as Iraq preferred. Guillet, who the report says was arrested in France last month for his oil-for-food activities, could not be reached. But last year he denied wrongdoing.
In a report last year, the top US arms inspector, Charles Duelfer, also charged that the two had received the right to buy Iraqi oil.
The new report states that Galloway was given the right to buy 20 million barrels of oil, and quotes former Iraqi vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan as telling the Senate panel that the rights were "because of his opinions about Iraq."
The report says that oil was also allocated to Galloway's charity, the Mariam Appeal, which had been created to help a leukemia victim. An Iraqi document indicates he may have used the charity "to conceal payments from the oil allocation he had received from the regime," the report says.
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