by Judi McLeod, Canadafreepress.com
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
The most notorious robber barons of the world are not all languishing in prison cells where they belong, but proactive within cells of the cutthroat, latter-day oil industry.
How else to explain that in spite of the incidence of oil industry executives linked to the ongoing Oil-for-Food scandal, there has been no mea culpa?
Darkening the landscape of the oil industry is a well-populated rogue's gallery that stretches all the way out from the guilty insiders of the United Nations Oil-for-Food saga, to the farthest corners of the globe.
Oil-reeking scandals are producing a stronger stench than any industrial pollution, and they're bound to be operating soon in a neigbourhood near you.
There's Serbian war criminal arkan, paid $1 million by Vitol to settle a score over a secret oil deal to supply Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia with fuel. The Observer established that millionaire oil trader Bob Finch, director of Vitol, based in Knightsbridge, London, used arkan as a `fixer' after a controversial oil deal in the former Yugoslavia collapsed.
There's United Nations Secretary General Kofi annan's son, Kojo and his personal relationship to Hani Yamani, the businessman son of the powerful Sheikh, OPEC founder and former Saudi oil minister, ahmed Yamani. Koji annan and the sheikh's son were working an oil deal in Morocco that was later abandoned.
While Kofi was hiring friends to probe oil-for-food and ignoring the documented atrocities of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, Kojo and Yani were in bed with Mugabe's nephew, Leo. Kojo and the sheikh's son were building the Harare airport in a scandal-plagued deal that included, in closing chapters, the bombing of an independent newspaper's printing facility by persons unknown.
Given the number of rogues unearthed by a probing mainline media, one would think the movers and shakers of the modern day oil industry would be folding their tents and going quietly into the night.
Incredibly, they're working at finessing their know-how on how to deal with rogue nations where oil is a commodity.
a conference, How to do Business in Rogue Nations got underway yesterday in, of all places, Houston, Texas.
While we now know that-- by association--the all-american Houston Texans NFL team has a tie to Oil-for-Food through Vitol, among the world's largest oil companies, who could expect this world-class city to be hosting such a conference?
Javier Loya, a partner in the Houston Texans, got into the oil brokering business through his brother Michael Loya, President of Vitol.
While the ownership of the Houston Texans may top the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction category, the Houston conference tops the Believe-It-Or-Not one.
George W. Bush, the President of the United States, who hails from Texas, is, at least ostensibly, trying to put rogue regimes out of business. In his home state, oil companies are trying to figure out how to do business with rogue states in order to keep themselves in the power to which they long ago became accustomed.
One cannot help ponder how Loya's Houston Texan cheerleaders must feel knowing that Javier Loya's brother's company did business with the most notorious arch-rapist of our times.
The publicly disgraced Enron's got nothing on some of the top players in today's corruption-ridden oil industry.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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