“Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one – and neither has anyone on my behalf.”

Icon of the Left and MP George Galloway to the Senate Select Committee on Investigations, May 2005 (link)

Would Galloway like a re-do? Senate investigators now say they have evidence that Galloway lied.

According to the Washington Post, Coleman’s committee has evidence that Galloway solicited oil allocations from Iraq during the period 1999-2003, and that $600,000 from the sale of oil were routed to Galloway’s wife and a charity.

According to the U.K.’s The Independent, “(Senator Norm) Coleman maintains that his evidence is based on bank records, as well as interviews with Tariq Aziz, the former foreign minister and deputy prime minister under Saddam, and with the former vice-president Taha Yasin Ramadan.” According to the Guardian, “several documents, authenticated by former regime officials, did mention Mr Galloway by name.”

—
The Telegraph itemizes the committee’s findings here, and has the best coverage of how the scheme worked here.

Technorati Tags: george galloway

This entry was posted on Monday, October 24th, 2005 at 9:24 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.