Navigator
Facebook
Search
Ads & Recent Photos
Recent Images
Random images
Welcome To Roj Bash Kurdistan 

Discredit Paul Bremer Discredit Bremer's Law Save KURDISTAN

This is where you can talk about every subject (previously it was called shout room)

Discredit Paul Bremer Discredit Bremer's Law Save KURDISTAN

PostAuthor: Anthea » Tue Nov 21, 2017 8:50 pm

So, Mr Bremer, where did all the money go?

At the end of the Iraq war, vast sums of money were made available to the US-led provisional authorities, headed by Paul Bremer, to spend on rebuilding the country. By the time Bremer left the post eight months later, $8.8bn of that money had disappeared. Ed Harriman on the extraordinary scandal of Iraq's missing billions

07/07/05 "The Guardian " -- --

When Paul Bremer, the American one time pro consul in Baghdad, arrived in Iraq soon after the official end of hostilities, there was $6bn left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and at least $10bn from resumed Iraqi oil exports. Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on May 22 2003, all these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), and intended to be spent by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) "in a transparent manner ... for the benefit of the Iraqi people".

The US Congress also voted to spend $18.4bn of US taxpayers' money on the redevelopment of Iraq. By June 28 last year, however, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20bn of Iraqi money, compared with $300m of US funds. The "reconstruction" of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan - but the US government funded the Marshall Plan. Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the "liberated" country, by the Iraqis themselves.

The CPA maintained one fund of nearly $600m cash for which there is no paperwork: $200m of it was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces. The US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

The "financial irregularities" described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated. Truckloads of dollars were handed out for which neither they nor the recipients felt they had to be accountable.

The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone. A further $3.4bn appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance "security".

Although Bremer was expected to manage Iraqi funds in a transparent manner, it was only in October 2003, six months after the fall of Saddam, that an International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB) was established to provide independent, international financial oversight of CPA spending. (This board includes representatives from the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.)

The IAMB first spent months trying to find auditors acceptable to the US. The Bahrain office of KPMG was finally appointed in April 2004. It was stonewalled.

"KPMG has encountered resistance from CPA staff regarding the submission of information required to complete our procedures," they wrote in an interim report. "Staff have indicated ... that cooperation with KPMG's undertakings is given a low priority." KPMG had one meeting at the Iraqi Ministry of Finance; meetings at all the other ministries were repeatedly postponed. The auditors even had trouble getting passes to enter the Green Zone.

There appears to have been good reason for the Americans to stall. At the end of June 2004, the CPA would be disbanded and Bremer would leave Iraq. There was no way the Bush administration would want independent auditors to publish a report into the financial propriety of its Iraqi administration while the CPA was still in existence and Bremer at its head still answerable to the press. So the report was published in July.

The auditors found that the CPA didn't keep accounts of the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in its vault, had awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, and had no idea what was happening to the money from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), which was being spent by the interim Iraqi government ministries.

This lack of transparency has led to allegations of corruption. An Iraqi hospital administrator told me that when he came to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA had crossed out the original price and doubled it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1m) was his retirement package.

When the Iraqi Governing Council asked Bremer why a contract to repair the Samarah cement factory was costing $60m rather than the agreed $20m, the American representative reportedly told them that they should be grateful the coalition had saved them from Saddam. Iraqis who were close to the Americans, had access to the Green Zone or held prominent posts in the new government ministries were also in a position personally to benefit enormously. Iraqi businessmen complain endlessly that they had to offer substantial bribes to Iraqi middlemen just to be able to bid for CPA contracts. Iraqi ministers' relatives got top jobs and fat contracts.

Further evidence of lack of transparency comes from a series of audits and reports carried out by the CPA's own inspector general's office (CPAIG). Set up in January 2004, it reports to Congress. Its auditors, accountants and criminal investigators often found themselves sitting alone at cafe tables in the Green Zone, shunned by their CPA compatriots. Their audit, published in July 2004, found that the American contracts officers in the CPA and Iraqi ministries "did not ensure that ... contract files contained all the required documents, a fair and reasonable price was paid for the services received, contractors were capable of meeting delivery schedules, or that contractors were paid in accordance with contract requirements".

Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11m and $26m worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work. Some $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for "personnel not in the field performing work" and "other improper charges" on just one oil pipeline repair contract.

Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPAIG instigated related to alleged theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion. It also investigated "a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report". One such case may have arisen when 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5m, was found on a plane in Lebanon that had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister.

At the same time, the IAMB discovered that Iraqi oil exports were unmetered. Neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation nor the American authorities could give a satisfactory explanation for this. "The only reason you wouldn't monitor them is if you don't want anyone else to know how much is going through," one petroleum executive told me.

Officially, Iraq exported $10bn worth of oil in the first year of the American occupation. Christian Aid has estimated that up to $4bn more may have been exported and is unaccounted for. If so, this would have created an off-the-books fund that both the Americans and their Iraqi allies could use with impunity to cover expenditures they would rather keep secret - among them the occupation costs, which were rising far beyond what the Bush administration could comfortably admit to Congress and the international community.

In the few weeks before Bremer left Iraq, the CPA handed out more than $3bn in new contracts to be paid for with Iraqi funds and managed by the US embassy in Baghdad. The CPA inspector general, now called the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (Sigir), has just released an audit report on the way the embassy has dealt with that responsibility. The auditors reviewed the files of 225 contracts totalling $327m to see if the embassy "could identify the current value of paid and unpaid contract obligations".

It couldn't. "Our review showed that financial records ... understated payments made by $108,255,875" and "overstated unpaid obligations by $119,361,286". The auditors also reviewed the paperwork of a further 300 contracts worth $332.9m: "Of 198 contract files reviewed, 154 did not contain evidence that goods and services were received, 169 did not contain invoices, and 14 did not contain evidence of payment." :shock:

Clearly, the Americans see no need to account for spending Iraqis' national income now any more than they did when Bremer was in charge. Neither the embassy chief of mission nor the US military commander replied to the auditors' invitation to comment. Instead, the US army contracting commander lamely pointed out that "the peaceful conditions envisioned in the early planning continue to elude the reconstruction efforts". This is a remarkable understatement. It's also an admission that Americans can't be expected to do their sums when they are spending other people's money to finance a war.

Lack of accountability does not stop with the Americans. In January this year, the Sigir issued a report detailing evidence of fraud, corruption and waste by the Iraqi Interim Government when Bremer was in charge. They found that $8.8bn - the entire Iraqi Interim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 - was not properly accounted for. The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and most of the ministries had no budget departments. Iraq's newly appointed ministers and their senior officials were free to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as they pleased, while American "advisers" looked on.

"CPA personnel did not review and compare financial, budgetary and operational performance to planned or expected results," the auditors explained. One ministry gave out $430m in contracts without its CPA advisers seeing any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8,206 guards, but only 602 could be found. There is simply no way of knowing how much of the $8.8bn has gone to pay for private militias and into private pockets.

"It's remarkable that the inspector general's office could have produced even a draft report with so many misconceptions and inaccuracies," Bremer said in his reply to the Sigir report. "At liberation, the Iraqi economy was dead in the water. So CPA's top priority was to get the economy going."

The Sigir has responded by releasing another audit this April, an investigation into the way Bremer's CPA managed cash payments from Iraqi funds in just one part of Iraq, the region around Hillah: "During the course of the audit, we identified deficiencies in the control of cash ... of such magnitude as to require prompt attention. Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives." They found that CPA headquarters in Baghdad "did not maintain full control and accountability for approximately $119.9m", and that agents in the field "cannot properly account for or support over $96.6m in cash and receipts". The agents were mostly Americans in Iraq on short-term contracts. One agent's account balance was "overstated by $2,825,755, and the error went undetected". Another agent was given $25m cash for which Bremer's office "acknowledged not having any supporting documentation". Of more than $23m given to another agent, there are only records for $6,306,836 paid to contractors.

Many of the American agents submitted their paperwork only hours before they headed to the airport. Two left Iraq without accounting for $750,000 each, which has never been found. CPA head office cleared several agents' balances of between $250,000 and $12m without any receipts. One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount. The auditors thought that "this suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash", pointing out that if his original figures had been correct, he would have accounted to the CPA for approximately $3.8m more than he had been given in the first place, which "suggests that the receipt documents provided to the DFI account manager were unreliable".

So where did the money go? You can't see it in Hillah. The schools, hospitals, water supply and electricity, all of which were supposed to benefit from these funds, are in ruins. The inescapable conclusion is that many of the American paying agents grabbed large bundles of cash for themselves and made sweet deals with their Iraqi contacts.

And so it continues. The IAMB's most recent audit of Iraqi government spending talks of "incomplete accounting", "lack of documented justification for limited competition for contracts at the Iraqi ministries", "possible misappropriation of oil revenues", "significant difficulties in ensuring completeness and accuracy of Iraqi budgets and controls over expenditures" and "non-deposit of proceeds of export sales of petroleum products into the appropriate accounts in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1483".

In the absence of any meaningful accountability, Iraqis have no way of knowing how much of the nation's wealth is being used for reconstruction and how much is being handed out to ministers' and civil servants' friends and families or funnelled into secret overseas bank accounts. Given that many Ba'athists are now back in government, some of that money may even be financing the insurgents.

Both Saddam and the US profited handsomely during his reign. He controlled Iraq's wealth while most of Iraq's oil went to Californian refineries to provide cheap petrol for American voters. US corporations, like those who enjoyed Saddam's favour, grew rich. Today, the system is much the same: the oil goes to California, and the new Iraqi government spends the national wealth with impunity.

· Bremer maintained one slush fund of nearly $600m in cash for which there is no paperwork: $200m of it was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces

· 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5m, was found on a plane in Lebanon that had been sent there by the new Iraqi interior minister

· One ministry claimed to be paying 8,206 guards, but only 602 could be found

· One American agent was given $23m to spend on restructuring; only $6m is accounted for


This is an edited version of an article that appears in the current issue of the London Review of Books (lrb).

http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e11523.htm
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28447
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Discredit Paul Bremer Discredit Bremer's Law Save KURDISTAN

Sponsor

Sponsor
 

Re: Discredit Paul Bremer Discredit Bremer's Law Save KURDIS

PostAuthor: Anthea » Tue Nov 21, 2017 9:08 pm

The Missing Billions: Ex-Iraq Occupation Chief
Paul Bremer Questioned on Oversight, Spending of Iraqi Money

Three former Army officers and two civilians have been indicted for diverting $3.6 million in Iraq reconstruction money to a contractor in exchange for cash, luxury cars and jewelry. The announcement came one day after the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing about how billions of dollars set aside for the Iraq reconstruction have gone missing.

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue on the issue of reconstruction, so-called, and private armies, we will continue with Jeremy Scahill, and we’ll also be joined by Pratap Chatterjee. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. The Justice Department has indicted three former Army officers and two civilians. They are accused of diverting $3.6 million in Iraqi reconstruction money to a contractor in exchange for cash, luxury cars and jewelry. The announcement came one day after the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing about how billions of dollars set aside for the Iraq reconstruction have gone missing. The committee’s chair, Henry Waxman, questioned Paul Bremer, former administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Little more than a year, $12 billion in U.S. currency removed from the vaults of the Federal Reserve and flown into Iraq, this money, mainly $100 bills, were packed into bricks, and each brick was worth $400,000 each. And I think we have a picture of the bricks on the screen. They were assembled into large palettes containing over $60 million in cash and flown into Iraq. In December 2003, Ambassador Bremer and the Coalition Provision Authority asked for a shipment of $1.5 billion to be flown into Iraq, and a Federal Reserve official described this in an email as the largest payout of U.S. currency in U.S. history. But this didn’t remain the largest for very long, because in June, $2.4 billion was sent to Iraq, and this time the Federal Reserve official wrote, quote, “Just when you think you’ve seen it all, the CPA is ordering $2,401,600,000 in currency.”

Well, the question this committee is trying to answer is, what happened to the money? Was it spent responsibility? Was it misspent? Was it wasted? Did it go out to pay off corrupt officials? Or, worst of all, did some of this money get in the hands of the insurgents and those who are fighting us today in Iraq? Ambassador Bremer, are you concerned about the possibility that some of this money went to ghost employees — we don’t know where it went — and might be showing up in the hands of insurgents that are fighting U.S. troops?

PAUL BREMER: If there were evidence of that, I would certainly be concerned.

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: We don’t know whether there’s evidence of it, but we don’t —

PAUL BREMER: I don’t know.

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: — know whether the people who got the money were entitled to it or what they did with it.

PAUL BREMER: Well, as the inspector general pointed out, the problem of ghost employees was certainly there, and it was there even before the invasion. But I have no knowledge of monies being diverted. I would certainly be concerned if I thought they were.

REP. HENRY WAXMAN: Well, $12 billion is a lot of money. It could have been used for a lot of projects that American taxpayers ended up funding through appropriations. It seems to me inconceivable that we can’t explain what happened to it, but that seems to be the situation we’re in.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Henry Waxman, questioning the former Iraq pro-consul Paul Bremer. Investigative journalist Pratap Chatterjee attended Tuesday’s hearing and joins us now from Washington, D.C. He’s managing editor of CorpWatch.org and author of Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation. Can you talk about the significance of this hearing and what Paul Bremer said, Pratap?

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Amy, this is a very important hearing. This hearing yesterday was the first what Henry Waxman promises will be two years of hearings. And they’re going to be looking into corruption, waste and abuse in Iraq, and also, for example, in border surveillance. Today’s hearing, he’s going to look at the money being spent on protecting the border ostensibly. What they were talking about yesterday and what Paul Bremer was on the stand to talk about was the $19.6 billion worth of Iraq’s money that the Coalition Provisional Authority spent in Iraq and squandered, much of it.

Dennis Kucinich at one point held up a piece of paper and said, “Mr. Bremer, what happened to this $500 million, which says, 'For security, TBD,' to be determined?” And, in fact, there were no answers, partly it’s because Bremer had not been briefed, and so he didn’t recognize the piece of paper, but I think what was more telling was the fact that he said, “I never read those minutes.” There were meetings twice a week of U.S. officials, where they decided how to spend Iraq’s own oil money. And Paul Bremer, who ultimately was responsible for that, candidly admitted at the hearing yesterday that he didn’t know what happened to the money.

His assistant, David Oliver, was present. He was his budget chief. And there was a quote played back, where he was interviewed, where somebody asked him from the BBC if he knew what happened to the money, and he said, “Frankly, it’s not important.” And the interviewer said, “Billions of dollars’ worth of money, and you didn’t know where it went?” And so they said, “Well, you know, this wasn’t American money. Why should we care?” And really, there was — Paul Bremer had this sort of cocksure attitude that came across. The Democrats, unfortunately, didn’t have all their facts marshaled. They weren’t able to go after him in that sense, because they weren’t really involved in the detailed kind of questioning that Waxman has been good on so far.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Pratap, of course, they obviously haven’t been reading your CorpWatch, or they would know about questions to ask.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: If they had, yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But I’d like to ask you also, you’ve been also tracking Halliburton consistently now for years. The reports about the Pentagon finally pulling money, because Halliburton had hired Blackwater, but hadn’t notified the government of it.

PRATAP CHATTERJEE: Juan, there was a very interesting moment, where Tina Ballard, who’s assistant secretary to the Army, said in yesterday’s hearing that they had withheld $19.6 million from Halliburton on Monday. And Waxman said, “Well, it looks like our hearing saved the government and the taxpayer $20 million, just by holding this hearing.”

The reason they withheld that money was because Halliburton had been using private security contractors in violation of their agreement with the Army, which said they would only use military security. So — and, in fact, Halliburton’s own lawyers — Waxman had a piece of paper, which showed that Halliburton’s own staff had said, “You can’t say” — I mean, the quote was, “A pig is a pig, even if it’s wearing lipstick. If we use a company that uses private security, and that’s a violation of our agreement, we’re going to lose our contract with the government.” So what the Army did yesterday was it took back $20 million, because Halliburton had acted outside its agreement.

Now, that was a small amount of money, and, in fact, much larger sums of money have been questioned by military auditors. As much as $1.5 billion have been questioned. It’s not absolutely certain this money was stolen or wasted. It’s just that this money has been questioned. And, unfortunately, the Pentagon has seen fit to give them the money, because they basically say, “It’s the fog of war. We don’t know what happened to the money. Halliburton deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

The good news now is that Halliburton’s contract has been taken away from them. It’s going to be competitively bid. My question is, who is going to get the next contract, and are they going to do a better job? It’s very possible that Halliburton will get one part of the contract to supervise the people that they were once in charge of in the first place. That’s something that we’ll discover in the future, but there promises to be many more hearings by the Government Reform Committee looking into these very specific matters of what happened to the over $20 billion that has been spent on Halliburton in Iraq.

https://www.democracynow.org/2007/2/8/t ... occupation

Food for thought - who are JUAN GONZALEZ & PRATAP CHATTERJEE ???
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28447
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart


Return to Roj Bash Cafe

Who is online

Registered users: No registered users

x

#{title}

#{text}