0.00000229975 %

[underpants]

$147,194 / 64,000,000,000

:wow:



http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--oil-for-food0810aug10,0,1953616.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork

The $64 billion oil-for-food program is also being investigated by half a dozen Congressional committees, the Manhattan District Attorney's office, and the U.S. attorney's office for the southern district of New

In the committee's third report released Monday, it said it had found enough evidence for a prosecution of program director Benon Sevan, alleging he took $147,184 in illegal kickbacks. Also on Monday, a U.N. official was charged for the first time in connection with the scandal. A Russian procurement officer, Alexander Yakovlev, pled guilty to soliciting a bribe and pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes on other contracts.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

1. ummmm

what is your point? you don't seem to be making one other than :wow:

SubjectProdigal

[underpants]

2. Immaterial

Illegal YES
but they had to go pretty deep to find that ~$150K

Now half the contractors paid kickbacks FOR SHAME luckily since the US of A took over things nothing like that has happened. Nope not with morals and values-NO WAY couldn't happen.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

3. corruption is corruption

lead by the US gub'mint or not. Immaterial it is not. Are you suggesting that as long as the theft is a small enough percentage of the overall, then it is ok? Sounds like the Superman movie where Richard Pryor's character was steal fractions of a penny per transaction to get rich...and the same goes for Office Space (I seem to recall Office Space cross-referencing that Superman movie). Should we not try to root this out? Should it be accepted anywhere? And of course, right there in the second paragraph of your snip it talks of bribes and the like into the millions. Is that ok? Is taking $150,000 so that the direction of billions of dollars of revenue can moved about ok?

Come on...certainly we know that it is NOT immaterial...

SubjectProdigal

[underpants]

5. Never would have showed up on an audit

Certainly not enough for a note/comment. It does show that Volkers did a thorough job.

[trotsky]

4. At last, some perspective.

Do people cheat? You bet. At the UN, in government, in the private sector, at home.

Ken Lay bilked his employees out of a fortune, yet the media hypes the oil-for-food "scandal" endlessly.

[Crankie Avalon]

6. To me, the concluding paragraphs were the most interesting...

Volcker promised that in the end his committee will provide an estimate of the dollar value of the corrupt dealings.

In March, he said there was no evidence the corruption level reached $21 billion as a Senate subcommittee estimated, but was more like the $11 billion in a CIA report or the $10 billion in a U.S. General Accounting Office report, most of it from oil smuggling outside the oil-for-food program.

"One of my frustrations is in assessing the smuggling," Volcker said. This was the area where he had gotten the least cooperation, he added.

He praised the cooperation of some law enforcement agencies, singling out the Manhattan District Attorney's office, the French, Italians, Swiss and a number of Middle Eastern countries.

"We have much better cooperation from the State Department in recent months, but when we get into areas of smuggling in particular, the cooperation is less forthcoming," he said.

Volcker singled out David Kelley, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, for refusing to cooperate with his investigation.


So let's see...turns out the real problem is "oil smuggling outside the oil-for-food program" and that attempts to investigate that particular area have been met with a "less forthcoming" State Department.

Who'da thunk it!

[underpants]

7. HEY! millionaires gotta eat too

:eyes:

I see that W blames his bad poll numbers (I didn't know he paid any attention to those) on gas and healthcare costs- If only he had influence with those people