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US probe links ex-French minister, British MP to Iraq oil scandal

AFP, Washington
A controversial British MP and a French former cabinet minister took huge oil allocations in kickbacks from Saddam Hussein's ousted Iraqi regime under the UN oil-for-food programme, a US Senate committee charged yesterday.
The committee has "detailed evidence" that Britain's George Galloway and French former interior minister Charles Pasqua received "lucrative oil allocations" from Baghdad, said Republican Senator and panel chairman Norm Coleman in a report.
The report by the US Senate's Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations is based on what it says are Iraqi oil ministry documents and testimony of senior officials in Saddam's regime, ousted in the US-led invasion in March 2003.
Galloway furiously denied the allegations as "a big lie."
The MP, who formed his own political group after being kicked out of Prime Minister Tony Blair's governing Labour Party for his virulent rhetoric against the Iraq war, won huge libel damages from a British newspaper last year after it made similar allegations.
"It doesn't matter how long you repeat a falsehood, it doesn't become other than a falsehood," Galloway told BBC radio.
"The big lie technique of telling a big lie often enough in the hope that people will believe it is clearly at work here."
Pasqua, who was twice France's interior minister, has in the past strongly denied the allegations. There was no immediate reaction Thursday from him.
However, one of his former diplomatic advisers, Bernard Guillet, was placed under investigation by a French magistrate two weeks ago on suspicion that he was involved in an oil-for-food fraud.
Coleman and Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, used the report to criticise the UN program, which itself is at the centre of a major international corruption investigation.
The panel said it had found evidence that Galloway received some 20 million barrels of oil in allocations from Iraq and Pasqua 11 million barrels.
It also supported US government assertions that Saddam's regime awarded oil contracts to influential foreign officials in an effort to maximise Baghdad's influence.
"These allocation holders -essentially gatekeepers to Iraqi oil -would sell their right to buy underpriced Iraqi crude to traditional oil producers and in turn received a 'commission', which typically ranged from three to 30 cents per barrel," said a statement released by Coleman and Levin.
"The staff report presents numerous documents from the Hussein-era ministry of oil that expressly identify Charles Pasqua and George Galloway as allocation recipients," they said.