WASHINGTON - A former U.S. occupation official in Iraq pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to steal more than $2 million and rigging bids on $8.6 million in reconstruction contracts.
Robert J. Stein, 50, of Fayetteville, N.C., admitted that he and his coconspirators smuggled millions of dollars out of Iraq into the United States aboard commercial airliners and laundered cash through multiple bank accounts in Switzerland, Amsterdam and Romania. ... The bid-rigging scheme was elaborate, calling for Bloom to submit several bids for companies he controlled and others that did not exist. Some of the bids were high, while others were low.
All of the bids came in under $500,000 each because that was the limit of Stein’s authority to award a contract in Hillah, a town 50 miles south of Baghdad.
Самый интересный момент:
Because he was convicted of fraud in 1996, Stein was a felon and could not buy weapons in the United States.
И таким людям дают контроль над деньгами...
MaxSt.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, says $8.8 billion is unaccounted for because oversight on the part of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the entity governing Iraq after the war, "was relatively nonexistent."
The former No. 2 man at the Coalition's transportation ministry, Frank Willis, concurs. "I would describe (the accounting system) as nonexistent." Without a financial infrastructure, checks and money transfers were not possible, so the Coalition kept billions in cash to pay for its multitude of projects. "Fresh, new, crisp, unspent, just-printed $100 bills. It was the Wild West," says Willis.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
U.S. officials in postwar Iraq paid a contractor by stuffing $2 million worth of crisp bills into his gunnysack and routinely made cash payments around Baghdad from a pickup truck, according to a former official with the U.S. occupation government.
Because the country lacked a functioning banking system, contractors and Iraqi ministry officials were paid with bills taken from a basement vault in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces that served as headquarters for the Coalition Provisional Authority, former CPA official Frank Willis said.
Officials from the CPA, which ruled Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004, would count the money when it left the vault, but no one kept track of the cash after that, Willis said.
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
