Bayoil is incorporated in the Bahamas with affiliates in Switzerland and Luxembourg. A Chilean-Italian named Augusto Giangrandi, a resident of Florida, served as chairman of Bayoil. Although Bayoil principals David Chalmers, Jr., Briton John Irving, and Ludmil Dionissiev, a Bulgarian citizen and permanent resident of Houston, were indicted, Giangrandi was not touched.

Giangrandi has a history that goes back to the Iran-Iraq war when Donald Rumsfeld was helping to arm Saddam and when the Reagan-Bush administration was violating UN arms sanctions imposed against both warring parties. During the war, Iraq bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cluster bombs and other weapons from Carlos Cardoen, a Chilean arms manufacturer who was close to Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. In 1983, Cardoen hired Giangrandi, then a resident of Florida, to ship zirconium from the United States to Iraq. Zirconium is used in the manufacture of cluster bombs. Giangrandi falsely stated in his expert license application that the zirconium would be used for mining explosives in Chile. Giangrandi also owned Cosmos of Livorno, Italy, the manufacturer of mini-submarines and served as President of Swisstech, Cardoen’s marketing unit.

According to a 1995 deposition by Howard Teicher, a Reagan National Security Council official, Cardoen was working for the CIA to illegally ship military hardware to Saddam. Giangrandi’s operation was part of a much larger criminal conspiracy involving agricultural loans guaranteed by the Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corporation and funded by Italy’s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). The failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) (also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International) had connections to both BNL and Ahmad Chalabi’s Petra Bank. In 1992, The Wall Street Journal reported that George W. Bush and Jeb Bush had been named as potential witnesses in the class action lawsuit brought about the clients of BCCI who had been defrauded in the bank’s collapse. During the time, George W. was involved in various failed oil companies in Houston and Jeb, operating from a base in Miami, was involved in suspicious real estate deals.

There was another Florida connection to the illegal arms shipments to Iraq. Iraqi arms dealer Ishan Barbouti worked with Iran-contra felon Richard Secord to secretly ship large amounts of cyanide from Product Ingredient Technologies, a food-flavoring factory in Florida, to Iraq for use in Saddam’s nerve gas production during the 1980s. All of these transactions involving Bayoil’s Giangrandi, Cardoen, Secord, and Barbouti, were known to President George H. W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker. Between 1990 and 1991, three journalists who were investigating various aspects of Cardoen’s secretive arms trading activities were found dead in suspicious circumstances. They were freelance writer Danny Casolaro, found dead from wrist slashes in a bathtub in a Martinsburg, West Virginia hotel; Lawrence Ng, a stringer for the Financial Times, found shot to death in the bathtub of his apartment in Guatemala City; and Jonathan Moyle, a British aviation journalist found hanging in the closet of his hotel room in Santiago, Chile. Moyle had uncovered details of Cardoen’s role in the Bush 41 deal to illegally ship weapons to Iraq.

Under the Oil-for-Food program, the Saddam regime was charging a hefty surcharge per barrel of oil – money that went directly into the bank accounts of Saddam and his closest officials. According to the Democratic minority report, while French company TotalFinaElf objected to paying the surcharge, American companies like ExxonMobil and Texaco began to acquire Iraqi oil through third parties that were paying the surcharge. These third parties included Bayoil. In mid-February 2003, just weeks from the onset of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, oil tankers began loading Iraqi crude at the Iraqi port of Khor al-Amaya. The Bush administration-approved sanction-busting oil shipments involved a Jordanian company named Millenium, owned by the Shaheen Business Investment Group and a Connecticut-based shipbroker called Odin Marine, Inc.. Oil tankers were permitted to off load their oil at the UAE port of Fujairah for reshipment on larger tankers without any interference from the U.S. Navy-led Maritime Interdiction Force, set up to enforce the sanctions. Giangrandi’s company, Italtech, was involved in a number of the shipments as a U.N. contract holder (lifter).

When Iraq’s Oil Minister expressed his suspicion that the oil shipments would never get by the U.S. Navy defenses, a mysterious high-ranking visitor told him the Iraqi oil was “for the sake of the people who work for the defense of the United States. It will pass through safely.” When the unknown visitor later asked for additional oil shipments from Khor al-Amaya he assured the minister that “you will never hear about this is the press any more. The U.S. forces will make them be quiet.”

Millennium chartered seven ships through Odin. Shipping communications obtained by the committee proved that the tankers traveled with the full knowledge and acquiescence of the Maritime Interdiction Force, then under the command of a U.S. Naval Officer, Commander Harry French. The MIF permitted all the ships loading oil from Khor al-Amaya to leave the Gulf without interference. Odin became concerned about the legality of the shipments and eventually contacted U.S. State Department official Amy Schedlebauer. Two hours after Odin’s General Counsel contacted Schedlebauer, she responded in an e-mail: ‘AWARE OF THE SHIPMENTS AND HAS DETERMINED NOT TO TAKE ACTION.”

Coleman and Levin wrote a February 8, 2005 letter to Rumsfeld asking about the operations of the Maritime Interdiction Force in the Gulf prior to the war. A similafr letter was sent to the State Department inquiring about the illegal Khor al-Amaya oil shipments. To date, the committee has not received an answer from either Rumfeld or Rice.

Minority report documents indicate that one of the largest recipients of Bayoil Iraqi oil shipments was Enron, the bankrupt company that served as a virtual slush fund for the political campaigns of George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The following describe the shipments to Enron:



At the same time Enron Chairman Kenneth (“Kenny Boy”) Lay was involved in Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force secret dealings and when he was stuffing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pockets of George W. Bush and Cheney’s political campaign, he also managed to illegally stick $206, 757 into the pockets of Saddam Hussein and his cohorts.

The Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal also involves one of the Bush children – Dorothy “Doro” Bush Koch, sister of George W. Bush and married to Bobby Koch, reportedly a cousin member of the oil industry Koch family, owner of Koch Industries, which is also one of Bush’s largest political donors. The minority committee report indicates that Koch Industries was also a major recipient of illegal Iraqi oil and a huge source of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein:



The total sum in kickbacks from George W. Bush’s cousin-in-laws to Saddam’s bank accounts: $1,294,620.

George Galloway was correct when he called the Coleman Committee the “mother of all smoke screens.” Major political contributors and friends of Bush not only paid illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein but personally profited from sanctions-busting with Iraq. Those involved in the scheme included individuals who date back to the Reagan/Bush 41 “cluster bombs and biological and chemical weapons-for-oil” scandal of the 1980s. Galloway is correct when he stated that there is enough evidence on Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair and their neocon advisers to park them in prison cells in The Hague for an awfully long time.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based journalist and nationally distributed columnist.

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