Accounting problems

A follow-up on the charge that about $4 billion out of $5 billion dollars of Iraqi oil money is missing.

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.

The Treasury Dept. says that they never had the money - the Iraqis did, and spent it.

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.

..."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."

We can watch it on TV - Fox News, no doubt.

And speaking of the Iraqi ministries - I believe many were in the hands of U.S. appointed ministers.

I wonder who got paid a settlement. It wasn't the former POWs. BushCo blocked the payment of their settlement.

Apparently everyone is just supposed to take the Treasury Department's word that the money was returned to and spent by the Iraqis. The problem seems to be that there's no public record of it.

"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.

I believe the Trezh. (Like they wouldn't have made a big deal out of it if they had returned it? That would have been a "good news" story.)

....but hey, you do what you want....you will anyway.