(Prime Time Crime exclusive Dec. 11, 2005)
Oil-for-Food terror links
By Leo Knight
One of the things missing thus far in the media coverage of the Oil for Food scandal is their failure to notice that some of the companies and individuals involved as approved suppliers by the UN have significant connections to al Qaeda and the distinct possibility the UN helped fund the terror attacks on September 11, 2001.
The bank used by the UN to funnel the billions was BNP Paribas. Last April in Washington DC, members of the House International Relations Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations questioned executives of the bank. Committee Chairman, Dana Rohrabacher said “They are the banker, who is handling the transactions, and it's easy to think of transactions between two people, you know, one may be corrupt, one may not, but there is a banker in the middle there.”
Everett Schenk, CEO of BNP Paribas North America admitted that “mistakes” were made. “ . . .let me say that we have found that in the course of processing assignments and payments, some mistakes were made. Although mistakes are perhaps inevitable in the context of a program that requires the processing of approximately 54,000 payments under approximately 20,000 letters of credit and 32,000 amendments involving an estimated 5 million pages of documents, they still should not have occurred,” he testified.
Some mistakes? Well, I guess that’s one way of putting it.
One of the “mistakes” involved at least 40 transactions in which the bank was allegedly asked by Al Riyadh International Flowers to send money due them in the Oil for Food program to a smoky company called East Star Trading which seems to have disappeared. The bank was not allowed to make any third party payments. Yet, in these transactions they moved $70 million to this unapproved and unknown company.
I should add that Al Riyadh is owned by a member of the Saudi Royal Family, Prince Bandar bin Mohammed.
East Star was, initially anyway, headquartered in the Grand Cayman Islands. Investigators probing the deals believe East Star was a part of a network of companies collectively known as Pacific Interlink, itself a recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars for providing supplies to Iraq. For all that though, the $70 million BNP transferred to East Star has disappeared along with the company.
Pacific Interlink is an import / export company based in Malaysia. It operates throughout the Pacific, Middle East and Africa. It is controlled by a Yemeni consortium called the Hayel Saeed Anam Group of Companies or HSA.
HSA is run by its principal director Abdul Rahman Hayel Saeed who was one of the founders of Malaysian Swiss Gulf and African Chamber or MIGA based in Logano Switzerland. Other founders of MIGA included Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, Youssef Nada, Ahmed Totonji and Sadoon al Bunnia.
In 2002, Nasreddin and Nada, as well as MIGA, were listed by the United States and the UN as persons or groups providing support to al Qaeda.
In Lugano, where MIGA’s office is located, right next door is the Lugano Islamic Centre founded by Nasreddin. In 2003 after being put on the UN terror watch list, Nasreddin moved to Morocco and resigned from the Islamic Centre. He was replaced by Ali Ghaleb Himmat who, in 2002, was listed by the UN as being affiliated to or a member of al Qaeda. Himmat was also present at the founding meeting of MIGA over 20 years ago.
Iraqi born Ahmed Totonji is also another interesting fellow. He also founded the International Institute for Islamic Thought and has been named by US officials as under investigation in a probe into a group of companies and Islamic non-profits suspected as providing money to terror groups in what has come to be called the “Herndon charities” case.
HSA, Al Riyadh and Pacific Interlink were all companies approved by the United Nations in the $64 billion Oil for Food program all of which was funnelled through BNP Paribas.
It’s clear that Saddam Hussein raked billions out of the program designed to get food and supplies for Iraqis suffering from UN imposed sanctions after the first Gulf War. It is also clear that the significant overpricing of products created the slush to be siphoned. Equally, it is clear that some of the companies involved in the scandal have some very suspicious ties to terror groups.
While there are various investigations ongoing into all of this, it is unclear why it has been virtually ignored by the mainstream American media. Could it be because they don’t want to contemplate any links between Saddam and those responsible for Sept 11th?
Just asking.
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