Claudia Rosett is a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has written extensively about the U.S. Oil-for-Food program and resulting scandal that recently snared the plea bargain conviction of longtime Houston oilman, Oscar S. Wyatt, Jr. (previous posts here). Rosett attended Wyatt’s trial in New York and this Wall Street Journal op-ed on the aftermath of Wyatt’s plea bargain pretty much confirms my earlier speculation that Wyatt cut a good deal for himself under the circumstances:
Star witnesses facing Wyatt from the stand included two former Iraqi officials, Mubdir Al-Khudair and Yacoub Y. Yacoub. They have never before been questioned in a public setting, and were relocated to the U.S. by federal authorities this past year to protect them against retaliation in Iraq for cooperating in this probe.
Messrs. Khudair and Yacoub described a system corrupt to the core. Their duties inside Saddam Hussein’s bureaucracy consisted largely, and officially, of handling and keeping track of kickbacks. That included who had paid and how much, and via which front companies. When Saddam’s regime systematized its Oil for Food kickback demands across the board in 2000, keeping track of the graft flowing into Saddam’s secret coffers became a job so extensive that the marketing arm of Iraq’s Ministry of Oil, known as SOMO (State Oil Marketing Organization) developed an electronic database to track the flow of the “surcharges,” as they were called.
To show how this worked, prosecutors last week produced a silver laptop onto which Saddam’s entire oil kickback database had been downloaded by Mr. Yacoub, from backup copies he made just before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. With the laptop display projected onto a big screen before the jury, Mr. Yacoub booted up the system and into a query box typed “Coastal,” the name of Wyatt’s former oil company. Up came itemized lists of millions of dollars worth of surcharges he testified that Wyatt’s company, or affiliated fronts, had paid to the Iraqi regime. These were broken down not only chronologically, but according to which front companies Mr. Yacoub said had channeled the money.
Read the entire piece. Brett Clanton of the Chronicle adds this report on how the Wyatt case highlights the perils of doing business in foreign hotspots. Interesting stuff.
Former Houston Oilers defensive end and local sports radio celebrity Sean Jones appears to be in a heap of trouble.
