Some of you who have become unemployed because of Bu$h's plundering of
Amerika might want to consider working for Saddam, Inc., they're always
hiring...
Ex-Minister: Saddam May Have Billions
The Associated Press
CAIRO, Egypt - Ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein might still have stashed
away in foreign banks tens of billions of dollars that he skimmed for years
from oil revenues, a former Iraqi minister said, according to a London-based
Arabic newspaper.
Jewad Hashem, Iraq's planning minister in the late 1960s and early '70s who
now lives in Canada, said that 5 percent of oil revenues was ordered
deposited abroad in accounts under Saddam's supervision when Iraq
nationalized its oil industry in 1972.
Hashem's assertion is in his autobiography, which is being excerpted in the
Asharq Al-Awsat pan-Arab daily. In Wednesday's except, he wrote that Iraq's
former Revolutionary Command Council issued the decree to create a sort of
war chest for Saddam's Baath Party.
There was no way to independently confirm Hashem's story. International
efforts are under way to track accounts around the world in the name of
Saddam, the Baath Party and other former Iraqi officials.
Hashem wrote that Saddam told him and some other ministers that "the Baath
Party has come to rule for 300 years and to continue ruling or to come back
to rule if toppled by a coup, (and therefore) the party must have a huge
amount of money outside Iraq."
The former minister said Saddam told them that the party did not want to
repeat the mistake of 1963 when a military coup toppled the first Baath
government after nine months and it could not return to power quickly because
it lacked money.
Hashem said that by his calculation the 5 percent revenues from 1972 until
1990 would amount to $31 billion. After 1990, United Nations sanctions
following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait blocked the free transfer of money
abroad.
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