WASHINGTON – The Bush administration yesterday launched a worldwide hunt for Iraqi assets Saddam Hussein is believed to have shipped out of the country days before the war – including $1 billion that was looted from Iraq’s central bank by his son Qusay.
State Department and Treasury Department officials said the United States would do “everything possible” to get that money – and anything else Saddam may have plundered-back for the Iraqi people.
Other countries also have been asked to freeze any assets connected to Saddam’s former regime, officials said.
“All of these assets are the property of the Iraqi people are should be returned to them,” said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.
A team of Treasury agents has been assigned to try and pick up the trail of the stolen $1 billion – $900 million in U.S. dollars and $100 million in Euros – that Qusay and Saddam’s personal secretary, Abid al-Haimd Mahmood, removed from the central bank at 4 a.m. on March 18.
So large was the withdrawal that there are reports from eyewitnesses that they used three tractor-trailers to carry the cash. The money Saddam stole amounted to a quarter of the central bank’s hard-currency reserves, Iraqi bankers have estimated.
U.S. officials say they still don’t know where the money was taken. There have been intelligence reports that hours later, a group of tractor-trailers crossed into Syria, a country known to have been secretly helping Iraq during the war.
“It’s not surprising that Iraqi leaders would try to loot their country, get ill-gotten loot from the people into their own hands and try to flee the country with it,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
“That would fit very much the type of leadership that Iraq suffered from, where money that belonged to the Iraqi people could have been applied to health care, to hospitals, to food has been diverted into the hands of crooks,” Fleischer added.
In addition to the stolen money from the central bank, Saddam and his family are believed to have billions stashed in Europe and Asia through an intricate network of front companies.