perfidy

Read 'em and weep. The TotalElfFina scandal just gets worse, the more the company's ties to the Hussein regime come out. Aside from the multi-billion dollar extraction contracts TEF had with Iraq under Hussein, there is growing evidence of massive corporate corruption up to and including government payoffs. Blech. The Guardian has this story:

An Iraqi-born British billionaire told a French court yesterday how he had paid millions of pounds in kickbacks to French oil executives. Nadhmi Auchi, 65, reputedly Britain's seventh-richest man, is one of 37 company administrators and business partners accused of being involved in France's biggest postwar financial scandal in which the oil firm, now TotalFinaElf, allegedly paid out huge sums in bribes and backhanders to expand its empire.

N.B. Auchi is a native Iraqi who has had ties with Saddam Hussein in the past, and whose brothers were murdered by said dictator.

Also see this story, from last month:

The former head of Elf admitted yesterday that the French oil giant had secretly paid out millions of pounds to political parties of both right and left in an illegal campaign to buy backing. In testimony that will shake France's political system, Loik Le Floch-Prigent, one of 37 defendants on trial in its biggest postwar sleaze scandal, said nearly all the cash had gone to Jacques Chirac's conservative RPR party until the former president Francois Mitterrand demanded it be spread more evenly.

Even better (worse), Auchi is also on the board of the French Bank that holds $13b in Iraqi Oil-For-Food money, funds that are now suspected of being misused by Iraq. Good news! Here's the NY Times abstract from April.

I'm not going to claim that France's anti-Iraq-libervasion stance was purely about the oil-- it was also about sticking it to the USA, and also about living by their EU-European collectivist ethos. But stories like these make the picture rather darker, and bring the underpinnings of Chirac's stance into question.

Side note: France are one of the leading vendors to Iraq under the Oil For Food program. That program goes away if economic sanctions are lifted, as the USA wants. Let's sit back and watch! This'll be fuuun!