Galloway given 18m barrels of oil

[cal04]

Galloway given 18m barrels of oil from Saddam, claims independent US report


George Galloway faces fresh allegations of benefiting from Saddam Hussein's regime in a report into corruption in the United Nation's oil-for-food programme for Iraq. An independent investigation by the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker has charged that the MP received an allocation of 18 million barrels of oil from the regime. It also claims that $120,000 (£67,000) in revenues from oil sales was paid into the bank account of Mr Galloway's estranged wife.

The money allegedly paid to Amineh Abu Zayyad is a separate sum from the $150,000 that another investigation, by the US Senate, claimed she had received from oil sales. As Mr Volcker's report was published in New York yesterday, the former government minister Denis MacShane demanded a joint committee of the House of Commons and US Congress should inquire into the "serious allegations" against Mr Galloway.


Mr Giangrandi said that an Iraqi agent in his employ had told him that "oil had been given to 'Abu Mariam' and Fawaz Zureikat was acting as his representative". The report further holds that: "Iraq officials identified Mr Zureikat as acting on Mr Galloway's behalf to conduct the oil transactions in Baghdad."

However, Mr Volcker has not produced any evidence that any money was paid directly into accounts held by Mr Galloway. The report also acknowledges that "both Mr Galloway and Mr Zureikat have denied that Mr Galloway was involved in obtaining the oil allocations or receiving any proceeds from the oil sales".

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article322855.ece
(keep trying guys in the US ):sarcasm:

[babylonsister]

1. Paul Volcker, eh? I hope Galloway

comes out with voice blazing to dispute this:

From the independent.UK article:

An independent investigation by the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker has charged that the MP received an allocation of 18 million barrels of oil from the regime. It also claims that $120,000 (£67,000) in revenues from oil sales was paid into the bank account of Mr Galloway's estranged wife.

[enigma000]

2. Maybe he stored it in Rove's garage

What the **** does one do with 18m barrels of crude? Invest it in T-bills?

I'll suspend judgement.

[Taxloss]

4. Well, if this happened,

then he didn't see the barrels. To him they would only have existed on paper.

Edit: typo

[hippiechick]

3. .. and how farking easy was it for these crooks to cook their reciepts

to make it look like Galloway was doing the dirty deeds instead of them and their cronies ?

Please, can we really even trust ANYONE whose ever been related to the US Oil Industry/ GOP ?!?!?!

[leveymg]

5. Did he carry it home in the trunk of his car?

. . . Mr Volcker has not produced any evidence that any money was paid directly into accounts held by Mr Galloway. The report also acknowledges that "both Mr Galloway and Mr Zureikat have denied that Mr Galloway was involved in obtaining the oil allocations or receiving any proceeds from the oil sales".

That's a BIG however.

[Zynx]

6. That would be hundreds of millions of dollars. There are ways of proving

such a thing in that case.

[USA_1]

7. Bush's Allies Keep Trying ...

Mr Galloway has gone through 2 trials and a government audit in the UK and has won all 3 cases. At no point has the government succeeded in proving that he has committed any misdeed. In fact he has won $ 1ooooo pounds in a counter suit.

Bush has his puppets trying to silence Mr Galloway but it simply won't work.


IMPEACH BUSH!

[Sven77]

8. hes been attacked many times

he countersued and won every time. the video of him kicking coleman's ass(wellstones replacement) is amazing. these guys forge evidence just like they did for the iraq war. george exposes them every time and made alot of money sueing them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4553601.stm

[Catrina]

9. Speaking of Coleman

Those are the exact numbers Coleman used the other day when he attacked Galloway with that same allegation. If the report only came out yesterday, how did Coleman know those numbers?

I don't believe a word of it. Hiding that kind of money and/or millions of barrels of oil would be impossible. There would at least be a paper trail. Yet, Volker has no evidence??? BS!!

Coleman and the Bushies are just furious with Galloway because he told them what the world wanted to tell them to their faces. They are vengeful, vicious people.

I'd like to know why no one is investigating Halliburton, and Dick Cheney's windfall from the war he started. His stock options (which, as VP he should not have and which Sen. Lautenburg started a committee to investigate) are soaring into the millions. He never disclosed that he held those stock options when he became VP, then claimed he was not going to keep them, that they were going 'to charity'. Why not just hand them over to charity now?

This is so infuriating. There's no end to their criminal acts. Cheney lied about those Stock Options. He kept them because he knew he was going to start a war, that Halliburton would be given the contracts and that he was due to make a fortune. This is what is called 'Conflict of Interest' and why the rules don't allow it.

We should keep this before the public. He should be forced to turn over those secret energy minutes that he's been fighting to keep hidden from the country. Now is the time to go after him, and get back some of that tax money he has been stealing. God, I hate what these people have done to this country.

[PurityOfEssence]

10. Yeah, well he also wrongly accused Levin, so he's far from perfect

This guy is not the paragon of virtue that he seems. He may well be on the subject of the war--which is huge--but that doesn't necessarily make him clean on everything else.

His abuse of Carl Levin was nothing short of ignorant and stupid; Levin was one of only two Senators standing for re-election who voted against the Iraq War Resolution, and he was the only one to live to see election day. Galloway's ugly attack on him was done from the high horse of moral superiority when he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about; Levin took it like a gentleman and corrected him with restraint.

Never confuse vehemence and righteousness with correctness and honesty; many a demagogue has surfed in on the waves of decent causes. Many a tyrant had laudable beliefs. ANYONE so cocksure of himself has problems and needs to face extreme scrutiny. Perhaps he's not guilty of these charges, but there's no underpinning of moral rectitude that give him the right to not have to bear review; he's a mixed bag at best.

It's wonderful to see a fighter, but this man is far from perfect. He's vehemently anti-abortion and his views on women's equality and the intrusion of religion into politics are very much open to question. The joy of seeing someone fight back against the forces of darkness is heady, but that doesn't mean that the person doing it is completely clean.

We shall see.

[shadowknows69]

11. I heard on the news tonight

that there were like 2000 major companies embroiled in the scandal. Why aren't we rounding up thousands of CEOs?

[Psephos]

13. Because most of them are foreign-owned

However, the American companies that were involved will be prosecuted.

[Psephos]

12. There seems to be real confusion here about how the oil allocations worked

Neither Galloway nor anyone else alleged to have received vouchers (or as the Iraqis called them, "allocations") would have ever dealt directly in any oil.

The Iraqi system was devised to provide kickbacks to Saddam, and lesser payments to Saddam friendlies, from revenues produced from the sale of oil under the UN program. Friends of Iraq (predominantly, they were influential people in countries that sit on the UN Security Council, such as France, Russia, and China) were given vouchers for a quantity of oil. The recipients would then transfer these vouchers to companies wishing to buy oil from Iraq at a favorable rate. The companies would pay Iraq for the oil, pick it up at the oil terminal, and the voucher holder would receive a "commission" on the sale, typically from 3 to 30 cents per barrel. Voucher owners never owned oil at any point; they merely owned the transferable right to buy it at a favorable price. The mechanism was similar to a stock option.

"Tariq Aziz, who at the time was Iraq's deputy prime minister, told investigators that beneficiaries received oil barrel allocations based on their level of opposition to the sanctions."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/international/28companies.html

To summarize, voucher recipients never took possession of oil, never owned oil, never trafficked in oil. They simply skimmed a small amount of money off a large amount of oil in a way that hid their complicity and laundered the payola through seemingly routine oil purchases, with an even larger kickback flowing back to Saddam.

[Peace Patriot]

14. I urge you to CHANGE THIS SUBJECT LINE IMMEDIATELY! This could...

... well be nothing but another slander against Galloway. In fact, the article suggests just that, in parapraph 4.

Look at the sources of these allegations! "An Iraqi agent in his employ." "Iraqi officials." And Paul Volcker, for goddsakes, who "has not produced any evidence."

How do we know torture hasn't been used on these "Iraqi officials," or millions of our taxpayer dollars stuffed into their pockets?

Your title should read: "New charges against Galloway--but no evidence."

[FredScuttle]

15. Quite frankly

I don't care if the headline read "GALLOWAY RAPED IRAQI CHILDREN WHILE REAPING OIL BILLIONS".....


WHY. THE. FUCK. IS. OUR. CONGRESS. INVESTIGATING. A. BRITISH. M.P. INSTEAD. OF. THE. CROOKS. WHO. FABRICATED. THE. WMD. EVIDENCE?

[underpants]

17. I am kicking the whole thread so people can see that

in a nutshell

Perfect

[emad]

21. "WHY. THE. FUCK. IS. OUR. CONGRESS. INVESTIGATING. A".

Pretty obvious really.

Galloway has been a very public anti-war anti-Bush critic.

What better way for Poodle and Dumbass to silence their critics by letting Galloway sound off at every given opportunity while all the time lteeting the spooks and cops reel him in over fraud deceit and decades of humbug.

He ain't no Democrat. Just a loud mouthed self-publist hell bent on personal glory.

[leesa]

26. Well, obviously they are doing it to AVOID investigating those who

faked the WMD evidence. Normie's gonna get his ass kicked, once again, on this one.

[xchrom]

16. ok -- if we turn it upside down, then tilt it 45 degrees, line it up

with the north star, then walk counter clock wise around it -- it looks like we can drag the barrels of oil thingy might work on galloway.

[bemildred]

18. Smear ...

However, Mr Volcker has not produced any evidence that any money was paid directly into accounts held by Mr Galloway. The report also acknowledges that "both Mr Galloway and Mr Zureikat have denied that Mr Galloway was involved in obtaining the oil allocations or receiving any proceeds from the oil sales".

[emad]

19. Galloways face new claims over oil and cash: Guardian

Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Friday October 28, 2005
The Guardian


George Galloway and his wife faced fresh allegations yesterday over the illicit receipt of money from Saddam Hussein's oil-for-food programme. A UN inquiry, headed by Paul Volcker, the former head of the US Federal Reserve board, claimed that $120,000 had been paid into the bank account of Mr Galloway's wife, Amineh Abu-Zayyad, in 2000.

On Tuesday, a Senate sub-committee report claimed that she had received a separate payment from another businessman involved in the Iraqi oil trade worth $150,000.

The claims came in the final part of Mr Volcker's 18-month investigation into the programme. His report alleges that 2,200 companies from Britain, the US, France, Germany and Russia, paid a total of $1.8bn in kickbacks and illicit surcharges to Saddam Hussein's government.

The $64bn oil-for-food programme, which ran from 1996 to 2003, was set up by the UN to alleviate the impact of sanctions on Iraq. But it turned into a huge economic scam.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1602663,00.html

[savemefromdumbya]

20. Galloway was set up

the case of the forged documents. The US admin are good at doing that just like their British friends. How many barrels can you get in a pick up truck?

[SICKofTHEM]

22. BRING IT ON!

I would love to see them push this one further ... Galloway would rip their sorry a$$es a new one ... again!!

[emad]

23. What he said about Bush and the Iraq war was 100%. But he is no

Democrat and has been investigated in the UK for fraud, embezzlement and financial ties to CIA traitor Aldrich Ames.

Seems that some Dems round here have forgotten how Galloway slimed Clinton over Bosnia and the "bombing on an innocent aspirin factory" in Sudan some years ago.

Galloway= 100% crook.

Looks like the spooks are reeling him in slowly while Dumbass and Poodle glow with pride that the most vociferous political critic of the Iraq war has been caught with his hands in the till.

Priceless.

[JackRiddler]

24. Wow

What a disgusting set of statements.

The Sudan factory did make aspirin.

The Kosovo war was a crime. Clinton wasn't slimed, there was principled opposition to the alliance with the KLA mafia and the murder of a few thousand Yugoslavian civilians.

Clinton flies his true colors every time he appears with his Republican counterpart in crime.

And Golloway? He just keeps winning his cases against this obvious frame-up.

[emad]

29. Not a single Democrat politician has either backed Galloway or

defended him. That silence is deafening.

The only politician who has openly praised Galloway have been Robert Mugabe.

Clinton distanced himself from him after 1997 after torrents of scorn and abuse were poured on him by Galloway about Bosnia and other aspects of US foreign policy.

I've interviewed Galloway about half a dozen times since the Gulf War in 1991, for both UK TV news and UK press. In none of my professional dealings with him have I ever seen anything but blatant self-opportunism. And a lousy risk-taker who has no self-perception when he overplays his hand.

[K-W]

27. He has not been convicted, and no proof so far for the new alligations

So I really wonder how you justify the phrase "caught with his hands in the till."

For all I know he did something illegal, but so far there is no proof of that, and the 'where there is smoke there is fire' argument doesnt work with Galloway because we know for a fact that much of that smoke is fake.

[KansDem]

25. I HAVE IT!!! Galloway hid the 18 million barrels with Saddam's WMDs!

That must be it! Find one and you'll find the other!

:sarcasm:

[T_i_B]

28. George Galloway begins fight to clear his name

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/28/ugalloway.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/10/28/ixportaltop.html

George Galloway has begun the fight to clear his name after further allegations emerged last night about his involvement in Saddam Hussein's oil-for-food programme.

The new claims came in a United Nations report which alleged that Mr Galloway's wife, Dr Amineh Abu Zayyad, received more than $120,000 (£80,000) into her personal bank account.

The investigation also alleged that he received more than 18 million barrels of oil both directly and indirectly and that 11 million were allocated in his name.

Mr Galloway is currently in Paris for meetings with lawyers representing Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister. According to Mr Galloway, Mr Aziz has now issued a rebuttal, denying that he implicated the MP in any way.