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More mystery over missing Iraqi
millions
By Emad Mekay
WASHINGTON - The United States Treasury
Department says hundreds of millions of dollars in
seized Iraqi assets previously unaccounted for by the
US-led occupying force in Iraq were used to pay the
country's civil servants, hire a police force and buy
security equipment. But critics say that the US
authority should have publicized how it was spending the
money long before various groups raised questions of
transparency, and they charge that Washington is still
creaming off of the seized assets for the benefit of US
corporations without first consulting the Iraqi people.
Officials from the treasury, the US body
responsible for pushing Iraq to privatize its economy
and, before that, for confiscating billions of dollars
in Iraqi assets worldwide, were responding to
accusations that the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA), the US-controlled office that rules Iraq, had not
accounted for US$4 billion of seized money.
British charity Christian Aid last week accused
the CPA of lacking transparency, saying that it did not
publicly account for the $4 billion that came from
seized Iraqi assets in the US and from oil revenues
generated since May.
Some United Nations
Security Council diplomats had previously criticized the
CPA for cloaking the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) -
authorized by Security Council resolution 1483 last May
to safeguard the oil revenues and other money earmarked
for reconstruction - in secrecy and opaqueness.
The CPA was also faulted for trying to limit the
role of an international advisory and monitoring board
designated by the Security Council to monitor the
proceeds of Iraq's oil sales to that of a bookkeeper.
The charges prompted the authority on Monday to
publish a skeleton budget for the DFI on its website in
which it said it had received only $3 billion for the
fund.
Of that money, $1 billion was left over
from the UN's oil-for-food program, $1.4 billion came
from oil revenues since May, $300 million from Iraqi
assets overseas and, most controversially, only $200
million from a US treasury "special account", said the
CPA.
The special account is where treasury had
placed some $1.7 billion in Iraqi assets it had seized
in the US last year. The money was held in US banks
after Saddam Hussein's invasion of neighboring oil-rich
Kuwait in 1990.
Accounting for only $200 million
from the special account leaves $1.5 billion in a
financial black hole, Christian Aid complained on
Tuesday.
"There's less things on that [published
DFI budget] than there are on my bank statements," said
Dominic Nutt of Christian Aid in a phone interview from
London.
"We are pleased that they've
acknowledged there's a need to publish the figures ...
But this doesn't fulfill the need by any stretch of the
imagination. I think that the treasury special fund is
where there are no accounts at all ... There's $1.5
billion worth of that fund alone which is not accounted
for at all," he said.
The group again called on
the department and the CPA to come out in the open with
clear figures. "You kind of wonder 'what's the problem
guys? You are mandated by the UN to spend this money and
account for it ... so why are you afraid to sort of
publish the figures'?"
But a treasury official
told Inter Press Service that, with the exception of a
little more than $100 million that was used to pay out
judgements against the former Iraqi regime under US law,
all of the $1.5 billion in question were actually
returned to Iraq after the war ended in April.
The money, he said, is now part of the overall
CPA budget and remains outside of the DFI. "The money is
not missing at all," said Taylor Griffin of the
treasury's public affairs office. "It was being used
before the DFI even existed so it never went into the
DFI. The money is in Iraqi hands and is pretty much
spent."
"You can watch it on television if you
want to know what happened to that money ... It's been
in the hands of civil servants and pensioners and in the
hands of police forces in the form of radios and
communication equipment and in the coffers of the Iraqi
ministries."
Griffin said that more than $1
billion in Iraqi funds placed overseas remained there
because those countries are yet to decide how and when
they want to return the money. "Security Council
resolutions require them to return the money to the DFI.
But a lot of countries haven't returned it. Maybe they
[the critics] think that we have that money, but we do
not," Griffin added.
Christian Aid said that the
administration of President George W Bush should provide
more detailed accounts of how it is spending Iraqi money
as it continues to administer the country's revenues.
"If now under pressure from a number of sources,
including ourselves, the accounts are becoming more
transparent and they are now starting to tell us where
this money's gone, good," said John Davison of Christian
Aid on Wednesday. "That was the idea."
Groups
critical of the lack of transparency in the CPA's
spending have been particularly angry that the authority
is using Iraqi money to pay for questionable contracts -
some awarded without a public tendering process - with
US companies.
Davison said the online CPA
budgets do not detail where exactly the money was spent,
on which contracts or with which companies.
Washington has mostly restricted the main lucrative
reconstruction contracts in Iraq to gigantic US
companies that look set to lock in profitable contracts,
fueling accusations that the Bush administration was
seeking to benefit a select few US companies rather than
find the best, and possibly the cheapest, options to
help the Iraqi people rebuild.
"The issue is
that there's no transparency or limited transparency for
the use of Iraqi funds, predominantly oil revenue but
also for Iraqi seized assets," said Davison. "This
situation will continue as more and more oil revenues
are generated."
(Inter Press Service)
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