Who Is Nadhmi Auchi and What’s His Tie to Obama?

Who Is Nadhmi Auchi and What’s His Tie to Obama?
By Jack Kelly
You probably would have heard of Nadhmi Auchi by now if Sen. Barack Obama were a Republican.
A British citizen of Iraqi descent, Mr. Auchi, 70, is a billionaire, the 279th richest man in the world, according to a Forbes magazine survey last year.
A great deal of Mr. Auchi’s money was made doing business with the regime of Saddam Hussein, much of it under the table. In 1987, Mr. Auchi helped French and Italian firms win a huge oil pipeline contract in Iraq, chiefly by paying off Iraqi officials, according to testimony given by an Italian banker to prosecutors in Milan. In 2003, he was convicted for his role in what was then the largest scandal in French history, involving payoffs from executives of the oil company now known as Total to political figures in Spain, Germany and Africa.

“He has been able to collect British politicians the way other people collect stamps,” wrote Nick Cohen in a 2003 profile of Mr. Auchi in the left wing British newspaper the Observer.

Mr. Auchi was a leading supplier of arms to Saddam’s regime. A former Belgian ambassador to Luxembourg charged that a bank in Luxembourg owned principally by Mr. Auchi laundered funds — including oil for food money — for Saddam and other Islamic dictators.

“The name Nadhmi Auchi was just another name for Saddam’s intelligence service, or so we thought,” said Nibras Kazimi, a former Iraqi dissident who is now a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C.

Mr. Auchi is a business partner of Syrian-born businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko, who has supported Mr. Obama financially since his first run for the Illinois state senate in 1996.
Mr. Rezko currently is in jail awaiting trial on charges he extorted money from firms seeking to do business with the state of Illinois. (Mr. Rezko was also a fund raiser for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.)
Mr. Rezko’s bail was revoked Jan. 28 when the trial judge learned that he, friends and relatives had been wired $3.5 million from firms in Lebanon controlled by Mr. Auchi. The judge feared Mr. Rezko was about to flee the country.
Federal prosecutors allege a $10,000 contribution made by Mr. Rezko to Sen. Obama came from a $250,000 kickback, but there is no evidence Sen. Obama was aware of the source of the funds.
Nor is there evidence Sen. Obama did any favors for Mr. Rezko that skirted the law.
The most eyebrow raising connection between Mr. Rezko and Sen. Obama is the assistance Mr. Rezko provided in the purchase of the mansion on Chicago’s South Side that Sen. Obama bought in 2005.
The Obamas bought the house for $1.65 million — $300,000 below the asking price — perhaps because Mr. Rezko’s wife purchased from the owner an adjacent garden plot for $625,000. (The sellers deny they offered the Obamas a discount.) The Times of London wondered where Mrs. Rezko got the money to buy the garden plot. At the time, she had a salary of $37,000 and assets of only $35,000, the Times learned. Her husband told a court that at the time he had “no income, negative cash flow, no liquid assets,” the Times said.
The Times learned Mr. Rezko received an earlier $3.5 million loan from Mr. Auchi on May 23, 2005, through the Panamanian company Fintrade Services SA.
Mr. Rezko has described Mr. Auchi as a “close friend.” Mr. Auchi says they have only a business relationship. They’ve been partners in a chain of pizza restaurants in Wisconsin and in a major real estate development in Riverside Park in Chicago.
The connection between Mr. Auchi and Sen. Obama is tenuous. But given Mr. Auchi’s shady past, his history of bribing politicians, it’s not unreasonable to ask if Mr. Auchi, through Mr. Rezko, was trying to buy influence with a rising political star. And it’s curious that outside of the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune, both of which have written extensively on the Rezko-Obama relationship, only a British newspaper is asking.

Wild Thing’s comment……..
but there is no evidence Sen. Obama was aware of the source of the funds. Nor is there evidence Sen. Obama did any favors for Mr. Rezko that skirted the law.
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, the absence of evidence (of wrongdoing by Obama) is not the same as the evidence of absence.
This is from an article back in 2004

“Banque Paribas, headquartered in Paris, with a significant portion of shares owned by Saddam’s cousin Nadhmi Auchi, moved money for the Al-Mahdi network in the 1980s and was the bank chosen to handle the Iraqi oil-for-food payments. In fact, Iraq insisted that Paribas handle the oil-for-food escrow account. A corporate document for Al Taqwa Trade, Property and Industry Co. Ltd. of Liechtenstein — an al-Qaeda network shell company also shut down by the United States — lists Banque Paribas, Lugano, where it had accounts. (Paribas in 2000 merged with another French bank to create BNP Paribas, with Auchi continuing as one of the largest shareholders.)”

Following Saddam Hussein’s Secret Money-Laundering Trail

“A detailed analysis of Saddam Hussein’s secret money-laundering techniques shows here for the first time how he used the same offshore money launderers as Osama bin Laden. That covert money network, based in the tax havens of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Panama and Nassau, helped bankroll the war machines of both Iraq and al-Qaeda.”

“More than 1,000 pages of confidential corporate, bank and legal documents show how the network functioned. The papers come from court cases filed in several European countries, from corporate records, from investigations by Italian police, from a report of the Kroll international investigative agency, and from private sources. The documents are the basis of further investigations coordinated in Europe by the prosecutor of Milan. They show, for example, that a father-and-son team in Liechtenstein, whose business is setting up shell companies and secret bank accounts, worked to move the money of both Saddam and al-Qaeda.”

“Engelbert Schreiber and his son Englebert Schreiber Jr. are listed as founder or board member of Mediterranean Enterprises Development Projects, Tradex, Techno Service Intl., Saidomin and Executive Flight Assistance, all Liechtenstein companies that handled arms sales and payoffs for Saddam. They also are listed on corporate documents for Nasreddin International Group Ltd. Holding (Liechtenstein). Ahmed Idriss Nasreddin, on the U.S. terrorist blacklist, was a founder of Al Taqwa, the bank that moved money for al-Qaeda and which was closed down by the United States after 9/11. The Schreibers declined to respond to numerous requests for comment.”

And then this……………………
Cronyism In Iraq?
November 2003
Time CNN

“Now another deal is coming under scrutiny. A senior Pentagon official told TIME that the U.S. is reviewing its decision to grant the mobile license for Baghdad and central Iraq to a consortium led by Egyptian telecom giant Orascom because of its ties to Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born billionaire who built his fortune partly through arms deals with the Iraqi regime in the 1980s. Industry sources say Auchi provided Orascom with a $20 million loan to help pay down its $500 million debt. The sources say the loan gave Auchi, who faced French prosecutors earlier this year for his role in a corruption and embezzlement scandal, a controlling stake in Orascom. A senior U.S. official says Orascom’s ties to Auchi are being investigated. As a result, no mobile licenses have yet been issued.”