A 'fraud' bigger than Madoff

[Christa]

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff's notorious Ponzi scheme.
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"I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad," said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.

In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in "pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills" to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.

Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad's infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later.

Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defence Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly and armoured cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of the Defence Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent or participants in the fraud.

Full article:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/a-fraud-bigger-than-madoff-1622987.html

ps:

Thank you to the secret admirer who gave me a heart :hug:

[Cato the Younger]

1. Like I've always said

Blame all the pain in the country on Wall Street all you want but what we should do is storm the Pentagon and the entire military industrial complex. those a**holes will rape and kill us all faster than a banker could even dream of.

[Wapsie B]

2. What did Rummy tell us? That there were trillions of $$$ unaccounted for with Iraq?

$125 billion doesn't surprise me at all. And to top it all off, the same gopers who spared no expense over there because we're in a war nickel and dimed Obama's stimulus bill. :eyes:

[aquart]

3. We kinda knew in advance.

When they wrote it in that these assholes weren't liable for one damn thing they did over there.

[DemWynner]

4. When people complain about all the stimulas money

I try ans remind them of all the money that was wasted for this terrible war in Iraq. It makes me mad that they spent all my money over there, killing innocents and making their lives miserable. I would rather spend billions on the US economy than on Cheney's business!