So it is okay that Sadam has money but not the country

[jbooma]

I think it is better that the country gets the money now and not the leader.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/1001212.asp?0cv=CB10

Saddam may have billions of dollars

Former Iraqi minister says oil revenue was skimmed for years

ASSOCIATED PRESS

CAIRO, Egypt, Dec. 4 — Ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein might still have stashed away in foreign banks tens of billions of dollars that he skimmed for years from oil revenues, a former Iraqi minister said, according to a London-based Arabic newspaper.

JEWAD HASHEM, Iraq’s planning minister in the late 1960s and early ’70s who now lives in Canada, said that 5 percent of oil revenues was ordered deposited abroad in accounts under Saddam’s supervision when Iraq nationalized its oil industry in 1972.

Hashem’s assertion is in his autobiography, which is being excerpted in the Asharq Al-Awsat pan-Arab daily. In Wednesday’s except, he wrote that Iraq’s former Revolutionary Command Council issued the decree to create a sort of war chest for Saddam’s Baath Party.

There was no way to independently confirm Hashem’s story. International efforts are under way to track accounts around the world in the name of Saddam, the Baath Party and other former Iraqi officials.

Hashem wrote that Saddam told him and some other ministers that “the Baath Party has come to rule for 300 years and to continue ruling or to come back to rule if toppled by a coup, (and therefore) the party must have a huge amount of money outside Iraq.”

The former minister said Saddam told them that the party did not want to repeat the mistake of 1963 when a military coup toppled the first Baath government after nine months and it could not return to power quickly because it lacked money.

Hashem said that by his calculation the 5 percent revenues from 1972 until 1990 would amount to $31 billion. After 1990, United Nations sanctions following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait blocked the free transfer of money abroad.