A New York Post article today The French War For Oil is all about France. Kenneth Timmerman forgot to mention another anti-war country with oil interests in Iraq – Canada.
… the French interest in maintaining Saddam Hussein in power was spelled out in excruciating detail. The price tag: close to $100 billion. That was what French oil companies stood to profit in the first seven years of their exclusive oil arrangements – had Saddam remained in power.
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Almost as soon as the guns went silent after the first Gulf war in 1991, French oil giants Total SA and Elf Aquitaine – who have now merged and expanded to become TotalFinaElf – sought a competitive advantage over their rivals in Iraq by negotiating exclusive production-sharing contracts with Saddam’s regime that were intended to give them a stranglehold on Iraq’s future oil production for decades to come.
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The Total contract, a copy of which I obtained, was “very one-sided,” says Hillman. (Hillman, a political economist and a managing partner at Trireme Investments in New York, did a detailed analysis of the contract.) An ordinary production agreement typically grants the foreign partner a maximum of 50 percent of the gross proceeds of the oil produced at the field they develop. But this deal gave Total 75 percent of the total production. “This is highly unusual,” he said. Indeed, it was extortion.
But Saddam willingly agreed: He saw the Total deal, and a similar one with Elf, as the price he had to pay to secure French political support at the United Nations.
What is the Canadian connection ?
Paul Desmarais Sr. His sons, Andr� and Paul Desmarais Jr. are the current co-CEO’s of Power Corporation of Canada, the majority shareholder in France’s TotalFinaElf.
Andr� is married to former PM Jean Chretien’s daughter, France.
Stockwell Day (Alliance) – during Question Period:
“I do not fault the Prime Minister’s family ties with his nephew, our Ambassador to France,” said Day “or with Paul Desmarais Sr. who is the largest individual shareholder of France’s largest corporation, TotalFinaElf, which has billions of dollars of contracts with Saddam’s former regime. With this valuable source of information and experience at his fingertips, has the Prime Minister ever discussed Iraq or France with his family or friends in the Desmarais empire?”
This link lists the prominant Canadian politicians who include PowerCorp on their resume – they include Trudeau, Mulroney – and current Prime Minister Paul Martin.
With the revelations about the UN Oil-for-food kickback scandal finally breaking the surface, and the depth of corruption in the Chretien government emerging via Adscam, the Chirac-TotalFinaElf-PowerCorp-Chretien connections are just hanging there for the picking, like rotten fruit from a tree.
That is, if the anti-American leftists in the Canadian media can bring themselves to face the possibility that Canada’s “principled” position on Iraq was all about oil.