Roger Simon's Mystery OK. It's tinfoil hat time. Roger Simon begins with a mystery. Where is the Oil for Food investigation going? ...
Roger Simon's Mystery
OK. It's tinfoil hat time. Roger
Simon begins with a mystery. Where is the Oil for Food investigation going?
I know - this blog seems obsessed with the Oil-for-Food scandal, but it is
one of the greatest mysteries of our time and this blog is written by a
mystery writer. And, as with any good mystery, you never know the identity of
Mr. Big until the very last minute. Of course, in this case it has seemed for
some time that Mr. Big's initial (pace Kafka) would be K. But who knows? There
are nooks and crannies as far North as Ontario now. Surprises could occur.
Ontario? Does anything spooky ever happen in Ontario? In this case, maybe.
Here's a chart I drew up based on known connections. A Canadian high-ranking UN
official named Maurice Strong has resigned after being accused to being one of
two officials who Saddam bagman Tongsun Park met. According to the Washington
Post:
UNITED NATIONS, April 20 -- The United Nations' special envoy to North Korea, Maurice F. Strong, decided Wednesday to step aside until U.N.-appointed investigators and federal prosecutors finish examining his financial ties to a South Korean lobbyist accused of trying to bribe U.N. officials.
The move comes less than a week after federal authorities charged Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman, with lobbying U.N. officials as an "unregistered agent" of Saddam Hussein. A witness said Park in 1996 and 1997 invested $1 million in Iraqi funds in a Canadian company owned by the son of a high-ranking U.N. official, a federal investigator said.
Strong, a Canadian entrepreneur and environmentalist, acknowledged Monday that
Park had invested money in a business he was "associated with" in
1997 and later advised him on his dealings with Pyongyang.
However, this same Maurice Strong has connections to Paul Martin, the Prime
Minister of Canada who is now being
accused of presiding over a decades long corruption scandal and to the
French-Canadian Demarais family which have strong monetary connections to Total
Elf Aquitane, which is alleged to have dealings with Saddam Hussein and BNP
Paribas, the official bank of the Oil-For-Food program. The Guardian
reported on April 6, 2003:
An Anglo-Iraqi billionaire who has close links to the Blair government,
built his financial empire on peddling his influence with Saddam Hussein's
Baathist regime - the Observer can reveal. ... Auchi was arrested last week in
connection with a £26 million kickback scandal involving the French oil giant
Elf-Aquitaine. His arrest is the latest spectacular twist in a story that
spans three continents and involves an attempted assassination, two of
Europe's largest political corruption scandals and a series of multi-million
pound oil and arms deals with Saddam Hussein. An Observer investigation can
today reveal how a man who built his fortune on secretive deals with the Iraqi
regime came to mix with ministers in the Blair government.
Here are a few other snippets which are bound to add to the mystery. While
these associations are circumstantial and by no means conclusive, it does serve
as a useful roadmap for connecting the dots.
"On Friday, Mr. Hunt reported that Mr. Volcker is a close friend and paid adviser to billionaire Paul Desmarais Sr., who owns the Power Corp. of Canada. Power Corp. shares control of a holding company that is the largest single shareholder of the multinational energy firm Total, which received $1.75 billion worth of oil from Iraq. Total was in discussions with Saddam Hussein to develop oil fields in Iraq if sanctions were lifted (which would have made them worth billions of dollars more). Mr. Demarais' son is currently a director of Total."
-- Washington
Times
Just a month before the Canada Free Press revealed that Volcker, a former
Federal Reserve chairman, is a member of Power Corp.’s international
advisory board–and a close friend and personal adviser to Power’s owner,
Paul Desmarais Sr.–a U.S. congressional investigation into the UN scandal
discovered that Power Corp. had extensive connections to BNP Paribas, a French
bank that had been handpicked by the UN in 1996 to broker the Oil-for-Food
program. In fact, Power actually once owned a stake in Paribas through its
subsidiary, Pargesa Holding SA. The bank also purchased a stake in Power Corp.
in the mid-seventies and, as recently as 2003, BNP Paribas had a 14.7 per cent
equity and 21.3 per cent voting stake in Pargesa, company records show. John
Rae, a director and former executive at Power (brother of former Ontario
premier Bob Rae), was president and a director of the Paribas Bank of Canada
until 2000. And Power Corp. director Michel François-Poncet, who was, in
2001, the vice-chairman of Pargesa, also sat on Paribas’s board, though he
died Feb. 10, at the age of 70. A former chair of Paribas’s management
board, André Levy-Lang, is currently a member of Power’s international
advisory council. And Amaury-Daniel de Seze, a member of BNP Paribas’s
executive council, also sat on Pargesa’s administrative council in 2002. -- Canada
Free Press
A UN official said Mr Strong was in the Dominican Republic recuperating
from pneumonia and would be making no public comments. Mr Annan, asked if he
had known of the relationship between Mr Strong and Park, said he was not
aware of it. Mr Strong was also a member of the board of Air Harbour
Technologies, along with Mr Annan's son, Kojo Annan, whom the UN is also
investigating for possible conflicts of interest in the award of an
oil-for-food contract to Cotecna, a Swiss company that employed him. -- Sydney
Morning Herald
Maurice Strong 68, and his wife, Hanne, fancy themselves quite the
environmental couple. He was chairman of the far-out Earth Council, earning
the nickname Father Earth. In 1992 he orchestrated the United Nations Earth
Sumniit, which called on the developed world to fork over, for its
environmental sins, $600 billion to the Third World. Together the Strongs run
the private Manitou Foundation. A gathering place for religious sects (Hanne
is into "spiritual interests"), it backs, among other things,
research into ethnobotany-the interactions between humans and plants. ... Nevertheless, Strong's a chap to be reckoned with. Congress says that without belt-tightening the U.N. can kiss good-bye $I.'3 billion in back U.S. dues. He is the driving force behind a U.N. reorganization plan aimed at dealing with Congress' objections.
... Strong is up to his eyeballs in Molten Metal Technology, a busted handler
of hazardous waste notorious for its flaky technology and ties to presidential
hopeful Al Gore (FORBES, Jan. 22, 1996 and Apr. 21, 1997). A big contributor
to Gore's campaigns, Molten Metals has surfaced in the Senate hearings on
corrupt campaign financing. ... So how did Strong come to be picked to
reengineer the U.N.? The way we hear it, former secretary general Boutros
Boutros-Ghali wanted to recruit someone close to the current Administration.
Strong, Al Gore's pal, fit the bill. Boutros-Ghali was tossed out last year,
but his successor, Kofi Annan, allowed Strong to stay on. Strong says he
doesn't want the U.N.'s head honcho's job. His mission, he says, is to save
the the planet from industry's depredations. Will the real Maurice Strong
please stand up? Global
Policy Org, 1998
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