KOFI'S CASH LAUNDRY . . .
Fri Nov 19, 2:29 AM ET
When French bank BNP Paribas was jockeying to win the United Nations bank account for Saddam's Oil-for-Food program, it's not likely that its sales pitch was: "The job is so easy, a monkey could do it."
But as Congress widens its probe into Oil-for-Food's legacy of global bribery and theft, the bank is fast realizing that a confession of stupidity is its best maybe its only defense against what could be a massive financial liability.
As Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) put it on Wednesday, the U.N. aid program was a closed-end system of "hear no evil, speak no evil and see no evil."
"No one seemed to be in charge of watching Saddam Hussein while he and his government were conducting perhaps the largest financial swindle in history," Hyde observed at a congressional investigatory hearing.
Hyde's International Relations Committee has found that Saddam stole an eye-popping
$21 billion from the Iraqi people through Oil-for-Food. The despot diverted money that belonged to Iraqis into his own accounts then used the cash to buy weapons, bribe officials and journalists and reward terrorists.
Much of that money was first washed through that BNP account administered by the bank's
New York office.
Hyde thinks that BNP may have been "noncompliant" (to put it nicely) with standard banking practices possibly doling out millions in payments to Saddam's favorite contractors without proof of delivery of any actual goods to the Iraqi people, for example, or authorizing payments to third parties outside of the U.N.'s credit system.
Hyde has pledged to further investigate his early evidence to find if BNP "facilitated Saddam Hussein's manipulation and corruption of the program."
BNP Paribas' strategy is to play up its "see-no-evil" role. The North American CEO of the bank, Everett Schenk, appeared before Hyde's committee Wednesday to repeat one word over and over: "Non-discretionary."
* BNP's job was to deliver "non-discretionary" banking services to the United Nations, Schenk said.
* "The bank has had no discretion over how money has been spent or invested under the Oil-for-Food program," he repeated.
* "The responsibilities of the bank [were] non-discretionary banking services," he repeated once more.
Translation: It wasn't our job to make sure that Saddam wasn't laundering moneythrough these accounts at the expense if his people (the supposed beneficiaries of the UN account).
BNP was just doing what the United Nations told it to do, Schenk has testified because BNP desperately needs Congress to accept that it was paid millions of dollars just to process paper.
And that's because the Treasury Deptartment has been bandying about a much scarier word lately: "repatriation."
Assistant Treasury Secretary Juan Carlos Zarate told a second congressional committee this week that Treasury's mission is to "hunt to find and repatriate stolen Iraqi assets to the Iraqi people."
And BNP knows that in the absence of aggressive U.N. co-operation with U.S. investigators the bank will remain the last traceable stop for so many of those plundered billions.
BNP was paid, essentially, to be Saddam's sole financial gateway to the world.
If the Treasury can't find a huge chunk of Saddam's money because it was washed through an opaque system administered by the United Nations with BNP serving, at best, as silent enabler it's becoming clear that BNP must bear some responsibility for the lost cash.
Clearly there is a need to reclaim as much of the cash as possible for the Iraqi people. That goes without saying.
At the same time, BNP needs to be clear about the role U.N. higher-ups played in the rip-off.
The overriding question is: What did Kofi Annan know, and when did he know it?
We bet BNP can help with answers.
It is Congress' responsibility to see that they come quickly, and publicly.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...fiscashlaundry