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7-5-2003 Scotsman Saddam's billion dollar bank robbery By Gethin Chamberlain IT WAS just after 4am on the Tuesday before the war started when Qusay Hussein and Abid al-Haimd Mahmood turned up on the doorstep of Iraq's Central Bank with a convoy of articulated lorries and a letter signed by Qusay's father, Saddam Hussein. The letter authorised Qusay and Mahmood, Saddam's personal assistant, to remove one billion dollars from the vaults of the bank, one quarter of all its hard currency reserves. The lorries were to carry it away. The two men had also taken the precaution of bringing with them the director of the Central Bank, the Iraqi finance minister Hikmat Mizban Ibrahim al-Azzawi and the director of the Iraqi treasury. If the official who greeted the men had any doubts about the legitimacy of the order, he apparently kept them to himself. "When you get an order from Saddam Hussein, you do not discuss it," said one bank official later. And so began what could well turn out to be the largest bank robbery in history. It took the best part of two hours for the workers the men had brought with them to load the $900 million in $100 bills and $100 million in euros on to the three lorries. Then, without any further explanation about what they planned to do with the cash, they were gone. No-one knows what happened to the cash after it left the bank on the morning of 18 March. United States intelligence reports have suggested that a mysterious convoy of articulated lorries was later spotted crossing the border into Syria, its contents unknown, but US intelligence sources have been keen to paint Syria as a haven for fleeing members of the Iraqi regime and the report remains unconfirmed. Others have suggested that much of the cash may already have been recovered when US troops found $656 million in $100 bills stuffed into 164 aluminium boxes in the grounds of a presidential palace nearly a month later and about $100 million in euros in an armoured car. But no-one is really sure. What is certain, however, is that if the reports are correct - and yesterday they were confirmed by the US Treasury - they would constitute a dramatic departure from the methods Saddam and his family are alleged normally to have employed to empty the Iraqi coffers. Iraqi bank officials claimed that the country's banks had been largely left alone during Saddam's years in power, although the ruling family would sometimes demand cash handouts. "Sometimes they would come in for small amounts, maybe five million dollars," one explained. Estimates of the amount of money believed to have been diverted into bank accounts and front companies outside Iraq by Saddam and his family vary from as much as $40 billion down to a more conservative $5 billion. But the complexity of the Iraqi leadership's financial dealings could take some time to untangle. A report for the Coalition of International Justice last year, compiled by New York lawyer John Fawcett, suggested that some of Europe's leading banks were involved in handling cash which had been spirited out by the regime and it identified a network of countries, including Egypt, Russia, Australia and Vietnam, as being involved in illicit business deals with Iraq. There has also been concern about the role of Iraq's oil-for-food programme, with suspicions raised that it was used to fund members of the Iraqi regime and others in its pay. Investigators will also want to examine the workings of the state-owned Rafidian Bank, which has branches throughout the Middle East, including Jordan and Egypt, and which is known to have had dealings with a number of European banks A previous report by the security firm Kroll after the first Gulf war, threw up numbered Swiss bank accounts and investments in a number of high-profile world-wide companies, which were later frozen under international law in line with UN sanctions against Iraq. But others, where the precise ownership is murky and unclear, remain to be fully investigated. Financial experts believe that Saddam's half brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, may have been involved in placing much of the cash in Swiss bank accounts or in offshore accounts in countries which have not signed up to international banking agreements, making it extremely difficult to track down. Switzerland has agreed to freeze known Iraqi assets but that will not affect those accounts which have been set up in the names of cover organisations. Al-Tikriti, the Iraqi regime's former representative in Geneva, is believed to have siphoned off cash from oil sales which continued in defiance of UN sanctions. The US Congress has estimated that more than $6 billion was raised from such deals between 1997 and 2001 alone, and reports from Washington have suggested that the US Treasury had identified about $1.2 billion of such unfrozen Iraqi assets by the time the war broke out. Banking sources in the Middle East have suggested that much of the cash was moved out of the country in the days preceding the fall of Baghdad. Cash was said to have been transferred through Europe into mainly Jordanian and Palestinian banks and there has been speculation that some could have been funnelled towards extremist groups, including al-Qaeda, which may have used the same middlemen to look after its financial affairs. The widespread looting and the failure of coalition officials to put in place security measures to safeguard the banking system has further confused an already difficult situation. As much as $440 million may have been taken from Iraq's banks by looters, though the inability to assess exactly how much was taken has further hampered efforts to track down money removed through other methods. But not all Saddam's attempts to put his money beyond the reach of international investigators have succeeded. Last year the US seized $1.5 billion in Iraqi assets on top of the $1.7 billion seized after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. When, last month, US troops searching the grounds of one of Saddam's palaces in Baghdad's River Tigris area found the $656 million, there was initial speculation that the money may have come from oil sales to Syria and Turkey, outside the UN oil for food programme, although the discovery of Saddam's $1 billion cash withdrawal has raised fresh questions about that explanation. Like the cash removed from the Central Bank, the money was in bundles of $100 notes. It was a sight too tempting for three US soldiers who liberated $600,000 and hid it in a tree, where it was later discovered. The cash was taken under military escort to Baghdad international airport and placed under guard. A US Treasury spokesman Taylor Griffin said it would eventually be returned to the people of Iraq.
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................................................................................................................. Copyright ©2004 Gethin Chamberlain. All rights reserved. |
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