Text 16016, 243 rader
Skriven 2005-10-23 16:41:00 av Jeff Binkley (1:226/600)
Ärende: UN
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This surprises nobody except the left.  Like so many other times in 
history, they had their head in the sand and thought they could solve 
problems with money...

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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,173039,00.html

U.N. Procurement Scandal: Ties to Saddam and Al Qaeda 
Friday, October 21, 2005
By Claudia Rosett and George Russell  


NEW YORK — The scandal engulfing the United Nations Procurement 
Department (search) now appears to be bottomless. It also shows signs of 
growing more sinister, especially where it involves a mysterious private 
company called IHC Services (search), which did big business with the 
procurement department until it was removed from U.N. rosters in June. 

New details of how dark the scandal could prove to be have emerged from 
the private sale of IHC on June 3, 2005, just as the procurement scandal 
was about to break. It now appears that while doing business with the 
U.N., IHC had links both to Saddam Hussein’s old sanctions-busting 
networks, and to a Liechtenstein-based businessman, Engelbert Schreiber, 
Jr., known among other things for his ties to a figure designated by the 
U.N. itself as a financier of Al Qaeda (search).

Registered in New York State, with offices in New York City and Milan, 
IHC has been involved in possibly hundreds of millions of dollars' worth 
of business with the U.N. since the mid-1990s, serving both as a direct 
supplier and as a go-between for a wide variety of other contractors. 
This work has included IHC’s signing or helping to broker contracts for 
supplies ranging from portable generators to rations for U.N. 
peacekeeping troops in such trouble spots as West Africa and the Middle 
East.

IHC came under public scrutiny this summer, after FOX News broke the 
story on June 20 that IHC had maintained especially close ties with 
Alexander Yakovlev (search), a Russian official in the U.N. procurement 
department, who while handling an IHC contract with the U.N. had 
obtained a job for his son with the company, and had also been 
channeling funds to a secret offshore bank account.

Yakovlev resigned two days after the story broke. On August 8, he was 
accused by Paul Volcker’s U.N.-authorized probe into the Oil-for-Food 
scandal of taking more than $950,000 in bribes on $79 million worth of 
U.N. contracts. Yakovlev pleaded guilty in Manhattan Federal Court to 
charges of corruption, and he became a cooperating witness in the 
continuing federal investigation that last month led to the indictment 
of Vladimir Kuznetsov, head of the U.N. budget oversight committee. 
Kuznetsov says he is innocent.

Amid all this, one of the big mysteries has been: Who were the people 
who owned IHC? The answer still lies hidden behind a maze of front 
companies and affiliations that zig-zag from New York to Milan to the 
financial havens of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. But from documents 
finalizing the sale of IHC on June 3, 2005, some further details can be 
gleaned.

Corporate board minutes of IHC, obtained by FOX News, had mentioned a 
“sole shareholderö of IHC. The sole shareholder, according to the June 
sales documents on IHC, turns out to have been an even more mysterious 
company called Torno S.A.H. (search), based in the financial haven of 
Luxembourg. And Torno, in turn, had two major shareholders who approved 
the sale of Torno’s 100% interest in IHC. One of these shareholders was 
a Milan-based businessman, Dario Fischer (search), a director of IHC 
since at least 1996, who at the time of the sale was chairman of the 
board.

The other shareholder in Torno S.A.H., who gave his proxy to Fischer to 
approve the sale, was a man named Engelbert Schreiber, Jr. (search) He 
has been linked, either directly or through father-son family business, 
to a number of Liechtenstein enterprises affiliated at various times 
from the 1970s through at least the year 2000 with Ahmed Idris Nasreddin 
(search), a man designated as a terrorist financier by the U.S. and U.N. 
shortly after Sept. 11, 2001.

A naturalized Italian citizen, Nasreddin operated for decades out of 
Milan and Lugano, Switzerland, both as a businessman and a member of the 
terrorist Muslim Brotherhood, some elements of which morphed into Al 
Qaeda. In 2002, Nasreddin, along with a number of his enterprises, 
landed on the U.N.’s list of individuals or entities “belonging to or 
affiliated with Al Qaeda.ö He is now believed to be in Morocco.

The Schreiber father-son connections with Nasreddin are labyrinthine, 
but they are a subject familiar to trackers of terrorist money. 
Engelbert Schreiber, Sr. (search), served from the 1970s through the 
1990s in a variety of legal capacities on a number of Nasreddin-related 
enterprises registered in Liechtenstein. The name of Schreiber Jr., -- 
who cast his proxy this June in the sale of IHC -- appeared in the year 
2000 on Liechtenstein registry documents of the Wahda Charitable 
Foundation, which had Nasreddin on its board of directors, and in 1993 
on the Liechtenstein registry documents of the Nasreddin Charitable 
Foundation. In both cases, Schreiber Jr. was named as liquidator, which 
in Liechtenstein tends to entail significant discretionary powers.

Both Schreibers, father and son, have been named among the defendants in 
a 9/11 lawsuit brought in 2003 by the estate of former FBI counter-
terrorism expert John O’Neill, who died in the terrorist attacks on the 
World Trade Center. The lawsuit alleges that, according to 
Liechstenstein official documents, one of Schreiber’s businesses, 
Schreiber and Zindel, was “a legal entity involved in money laundering 
activities on behalf of Al Qaeda.ö That suit is now pending a motion to 
dismiss.

In a sworn declaration pertaining to this lawsuit, signed May 20, 2005, 
Schreiber Jr. attested that while he visited the U.S. on a number of 
occasions between 1988 and 1998, he has never done business either 
directly or through an agent in the U.S. IHC sales documents show that 
two days earlier, on May 18, he had given his proxy to Fischer, in 
Milan, to approve Torno’s sale of New York-registered IHC.

Schreiber also had a link to the U.N. Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, as a 
legal representative of a Liechtenstein-based company called Napex, 
which was among those approved by the U.N. to buy oil from Saddam’s 
regime under the 1996-2003 relief program. A report released last year 
by CIA chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer alleged that Saddam’s 
regime allocated oil to be sold to Napex in 2002, shortly before 
Saddam's government fell. There is no public evidence that this oil was 
actually shipped.

IHC itself turns out to have a connection with Saddam’s former networks 
by way of a shipping company based in Jordan, Petra Navigation Group 
(search), which advertises itself on its Web site as IHC’s agent in the 
Middle East, and has also been a registered vendor to the U.N. since mid-
2003. That’s a big change from Petra Navigation’s earlier history; from 
1991 to 1994, the U.S. Treasury placed Petra Navigation on the blacklist 
of firms blocked from doing business with the U.S. on grounds of 
sanctions-busting activities related to Iraq.

In 1994, Treasury lifted the block on Petra Navigation’s offices in 
Egypt and Jordan, but Petra Navigation’s office in Baghdad is still on 
Treasury’s blacklist “on account of claims involving Iraq,ö according to 
the Treasury order maintaining the designation. Asked repeatedly by FOX 
News to explain these connections and circumstances, Petra Navigation 
did not respond.

The timing of Petra Navigation’s arrival on the U.N. Procurement 
Department vendor list raises questions about whether IHC might have 
been involved in Petra’s approach to the U.N. Petra Navigation was 
registered on the U.N.’s list of approved vendors on June 27, 2003. Less 
than a month later, on July 10, 2003, Petra signed an agreement to act 
as IHC’s “exclusiveö agent in the Middle East, according to a notice 
posted as recently as this week on Petra Navigation’s English-language 
web site.

Both IHC and another of its business partners, Eurest Support Services 
(search), both now the subject of various probes, have recently 
disappeared from the U.N. registered vendor list. Petra Navigation is 
still on it.

What exactly these connections amount to, or how IHC came to occupy its 
special niche with the U.N. procurement department, is not clear. But it 
seems IHC changed character following an earlier change of ownership in 
the late 1980s. The company was founded in the U.S. in 1944 under the 
name of International Manufacturing and Equipment Company (search), or 
IMECO, as a small business dealing mainly in spare parts for 
construction and mining. In 1988, IMECO, merged with another U.S. 
company, Hofortech (search), to become IHC.

According to the then-owner, Ernest Ulrich, interviewed by phone 
recently in New York, IHC soon after the 1988 merger was bought out by a 
big construction company that Ulrich remembers as based in Milan. Ulrich 
says that under his ownership, IHC had done no business with the U.N. He 
says he continued working for the company for a few years after he sold 
it, then left in the early 1990s and has had nothing to do with it 
since. Ulrich does not recall any entity such as the Torno SAH in 
Luxembourg that had evidently acquired control by the time of this 
year’s sale of IHC.

There is a large international construction firm in Milan with a 
strikingly similar name to that of Torno S.A.H. – the Milanese company 
being Torno S.P.A (search). FOX News has not found any direct connection 
between the Torno SPA in Milan and the Torno SAH in Luxembourg. Torno 
S.P.A. in Milan did not respond to repeated queries, nor did IHC’s 
current chief executive officer, Ezio Testa, who has worked in IHC’s New 
York office for years.

FOX News has, however, come across one indirect link between Torno 
S.P.A. in Milan and IHC – via the name Angelo Simontacchi (search), a 
man who served in 1996 on IHC’s board of directors, according to IHC 
board minutes. According to another set of documents obtained by FOX 
News, there was an Angelo Simontacchi who, on behalf of Torno S.P.A. in 
Milan, signed a contract in 1984 enlisting the consulting services of 
another firm, Dumyntha Co. Inc, based in Lugano, Switzerland, to help 
bid on work for Saddam Hussein’s Ministry of Trade, related to a Baghdad 
trade fair in pre-sanctions Iraq. Queries to Torno SPA about Simontacchi 
also went unanswered.

By 1997, Simontacchi had left the IHC board, but another man with ties 
to Iraq had signed on as an IHC director. He was Giandomenico “Gianniö 
Picco (search), a veteran of many years on the U.N. staff, but at that 
time working in the private sector. Picco, who hails from Milan, had 
worked for the U.N. from 1973-1992, helping in the late 1980s to 
negotiate an end to the Iran-Iraq war. In 1992, just before leaving the 
U.N., Picco had also led a round of the early negotiations with Saddam’s 
regime over setting up the U.N. Oil-for-Food program in Iraq.

Later that same year, Picco left the U.N. and founded his own private 
consulting business, New York-based GDP Associates. According to a 
report by U.S. Senate investigators, Picco on a number of occasions from 
1997-2003 was consulted by an American oilman doing business under Oil-
for-Food, David Chalmers — who was indicted in April for allegedly 
paying kickbacks to Saddam’s regime. Chalmers has pleaded not guilty.

Picco’s arrival on IHC’s board came at roughly the same time that IHC 
appears to have first established ties to the U.N. On Dec. 22, 1996, 
according to the U.N., the company was registered on the U.N. 
Procurement Department’s list of approved vendors. That was the same 
month that the U.N. Oil-for-Food program began operation in Iraq.

From 1998 until at least February, 2000, Picco went on to serve as 
chairman of the board of IHC Services. During that time, in August 1999, 
he accepted an overlapping appointment by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi 
Annan to serve as a U.N. undersecretary-general and personal 
representative for Annan, starting in August, 1999, working on a project 
called the Dialogue of Civilizations. That project has ended, but Picco 
is currently a special adviser to Annan, with a contract in force until 
2006.

In June of this year, as the procurement scandal broke, and shortly 
after IHC was sold, the U.N. quietly suspended IHC from its list of 
approved vendors. But that has only drawn another curtain of secrecy 
over the issue.

Behind this maze the question still looms: Who during IHC’s seven years 
doing business with the U.N. was the real beneficial owner of this 
mysterious company? Liechtenstein figures such as Engelbert Schreiber, 
Jr. make most of their living by serving as stand-ins for others in one 
of the world’s most important centers of false-front corporate affairs. 
In an attempt to discover the real owner, FOX News has queried, among 
others, various former and current officers of IHC, including Picco, as 
well as Schreiber and Petra Navigation. None of these has responded.

At the U.N. itself, a spokesman says, “Current practice is that the 
names of beneficial owners of companies are not requested.ö That 
practice, adds the spokesman, “is now under review.ö

Claudia Rosett is journalist-in-residence with The Foundation for the 
Defense of Democracies. George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.


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