farmer panic selling now, page-8

Who knows Dave but it would seem there was heaps of it going which as I’ve mentioned before doesn’t surprise me one bit.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17921012-23109,00.html

Lobbyist indicted over oil-for-food
From: Reuters From correspondents in New York
January 24, 2006

A SOUTH Korean lobbyist has been indicted in New York on charges of scheming with top UN and Iraqi officials to defraud the now-defunct oil-for-food program.

Tongsun Park, 70, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan on charges including conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's former government and money laundering.
Mr Park was added to a previous indictment that now names 12 defendants, including Texas oil tycoon Oscar Wyatt, David Chalmers of Bayoil Inc, Bulgarian oil trader Ludmil Dionissiev and two Swiss executives and their companies.

Mr Park is accused of taking more than $US2 million ($2.66 million) in Iraqi payoffs while secretly lobbying on behalf of Hussein's government. He was arrested on January 6 in Houston and has remained in jail pending a decision on his bail, set to be considered at a hearing on Thursday.

The indictment said that in 1993 Mr Park met an unnamed high-ranking UN official and an unnamed collaborator now co-operating with the investigation to set terms for getting business under the oil-for-food program.

That meeting and a second meeting in Geneva that included two Iraqi officials were said to influence the 1995 UN resolution establishing the program.


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He was later paid by the Iraqi government for his efforts, including $US400,000 in cash in May 1996.
The UN oil-for-food program began in 1996 to allow Iraq to sell oil to buy civilian goods for its people living under UN sanctions after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The program administered $US67 billion worth of oil, and US and UN investigations have found that lobbyists and UN and Iraqi officials took kickbacks and bribes.

Mr Park was also at the centre of the 1970's "Koreagate" bribery scandal in Washington.

A date of June 20 was previously set for his trial.