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CNN Live Today

Interview With Jamie Dettmer of 'Insight'

Aired May 14, 2003 - 10:43   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: We are going to keep the topic on Iraq right now, and talk about money and where in the world is Saddam Hussein's personal fortune? A House panel this morning is asking that very question. Billions may have been secreted away through a labyrinth of complex bank transfers and other means. No one really knows how much money is out there, but $2 billion, at least, is believed to be the minimum. Some speculate it could be as high as $40 billion.
Senior editor Jamie Dettmer of "Insight" magazine has been covering this story and he is joining us today from Washington with more on the very difficult task of locating and recovering the missing money.

Jamie, good morning to you.

JAMIE DETTMER, "INSIGHT": Good morning.

KAGAN: How much do you think we're talking about? How much loot?

DETTMER: Well, it's very, very hard to know. Estimates, as you say, have ranged from $2 billion to up to $40 billion. We know that recently -- or in the last few months the U.S. Treasury has located about a billion dollars of Saddam Hussein-linked money in unknown bank accounts around the world. The Bank of England has frozen $648 million in London alone.

A lot of this is guesswork. We know that the -- Saddam Hussein and his sons and cronies were openly smuggling oil during the economic sanction period after the Gulf War. There have been estimates that just in the last three or four years they probably gained from that smuggling and also kickbacks on U.N.-approved oil exports, that they gained somewhere like 6 to $7 billion there alone, maybe up to $9 billion. They were also involved into smuggling into the country of cigarettes and luxury goods, and it's very hard to estimate how much that illicit trade may have brought in.

KAGAN: So it seems to me you are trying to figure out two paths here. The money, where it came from, and that seems easier to figure out, but then where do they put it, spreading it all around the world, some Western investments, and moving it quite often, as I understand.

DETTMER: Absolutely. Less Western investments than they were doing in the 1980s. If you recall, Saddam and his sons were investing pretty heavily in the Western economies, but a lot of that money and a lot of those investments were frozen. For example, $90 million during the Gulf War was frozen by the authorities in Western Europe in terms of an investment into a French company. Afterwards, after the Gulf War, they tended to move the money frequently, they tended to keep the bulk of it in bank deposits, government bonds including U.S. Treasury's, and then funneling quite a lot of money into, we think, hundreds of different offshore companies in tax havens in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Bahamas, etcetera.

KAGAN: And the third part of this is not just finding it, but what happens. You've talked about the American government freezing assets and the British government, but not all governments are willing to do that just because the U.S. government says that they should.

DETTMER: Well, it gets complicated, particularly -- the money won't be in an account that says "Saddam Hussein bank account." What he often did was put it in offshore companies which were controlled by holding companies, or it would be given to loyalists to the regime: businessmen, expatriate businessmen, lawyers, accountants, etcetera. So what a lot of the European courts are going to demand, even though they may be sympathetic to seizing -- freezing this money, returning it to Iraq, those European courts are going to say give us probable cause, show us, one, that it was Saddam Hussein's money, and link it to wrongdoing, and if they can't do that, there are going to be problems in the courts in Europe. There have already been problems in the search for bin Laden's money. Swiss and German courts in particular have got very frustrated with demands coming from Washington to freeze certain assets without much evidence showing that that money is linked to bin Laden.

KAGAN: What about some of the Iraqi officials who have been taken into custody? Any clues there, like from the former finance minister?

DETTMER: Well, there could well be, of course. Hikmat al- Azzawi, the former finance minister, and Barzan al-Tikriti, who is the half-brother of Saddam, were heavily involved in this rather far-flung Byzantine financial empire. The finance minister was involved in helping Saddam get around economic sanctions of the 1990s, and his half-brother was involved in quite a lot of overseeing of the offshore bank accounts.

But there are two points there. One, Saddam was a suspicious guy, and he divided by -- he ruled by dividing his inner circle in many ways. So -- there will be no one person who knows all the secrets. Secondly, we don't know how much either of those two are giving in terms of information to U.S. authorities now. It's going to be a painstaking operation, basically, of looking at companies they already know about, bank accounts they already suspect, and looking in any records they can get from the Central Bank in Iraq.

KAGAN: Sounds like it's going to take many years to figure out as much as they can, and probably we'll never know.

DETTMER: Many years, and many years ensnared in the courts, I suspect.

KAGAN: Yes. Absolutely. Jamie Dettmer from "Insight," great piece. Thank you.

DETTMER: Thank you very much.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com







Aired May 14, 2003 - 10:43   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: We are going to keep the topic on Iraq right now, and talk about money and where in the world is Saddam Hussein's personal fortune? A House panel this morning is asking that very question. Billions may have been secreted away through a labyrinth of complex bank transfers and other means. No one really knows how much money is out there, but $2 billion, at least, is believed to be the minimum. Some speculate it could be as high as $40 billion.
Senior editor Jamie Dettmer of "Insight" magazine has been covering this story and he is joining us today from Washington with more on the very difficult task of locating and recovering the missing money.

Jamie, good morning to you.

JAMIE DETTMER, "INSIGHT": Good morning.

KAGAN: How much do you think we're talking about? How much loot?

DETTMER: Well, it's very, very hard to know. Estimates, as you say, have ranged from $2 billion to up to $40 billion. We know that recently -- or in the last few months the U.S. Treasury has located about a billion dollars of Saddam Hussein-linked money in unknown bank accounts around the world. The Bank of England has frozen $648 million in London alone.

A lot of this is guesswork. We know that the -- Saddam Hussein and his sons and cronies were openly smuggling oil during the economic sanction period after the Gulf War. There have been estimates that just in the last three or four years they probably gained from that smuggling and also kickbacks on U.N.-approved oil exports, that they gained somewhere like 6 to $7 billion there alone, maybe up to $9 billion. They were also involved into smuggling into the country of cigarettes and luxury goods, and it's very hard to estimate how much that illicit trade may have brought in.

KAGAN: So it seems to me you are trying to figure out two paths here. The money, where it came from, and that seems easier to figure out, but then where do they put it, spreading it all around the world, some Western investments, and moving it quite often, as I understand.

DETTMER: Absolutely. Less Western investments than they were doing in the 1980s. If you recall, Saddam and his sons were investing pretty heavily in the Western economies, but a lot of that money and a lot of those investments were frozen. For example, $90 million during the Gulf War was frozen by the authorities in Western Europe in terms of an investment into a French company. Afterwards, after the Gulf War, they tended to move the money frequently, they tended to keep the bulk of it in bank deposits, government bonds including U.S. Treasury's, and then funneling quite a lot of money into, we think, hundreds of different offshore companies in tax havens in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Bahamas, etcetera.

KAGAN: And the third part of this is not just finding it, but what happens. You've talked about the American government freezing assets and the British government, but not all governments are willing to do that just because the U.S. government says that they should.

DETTMER: Well, it gets complicated, particularly -- the money won't be in an account that says "Saddam Hussein bank account." What he often did was put it in offshore companies which were controlled by holding companies, or it would be given to loyalists to the regime: businessmen, expatriate businessmen, lawyers, accountants, etcetera. So what a lot of the European courts are going to demand, even though they may be sympathetic to seizing -- freezing this money, returning it to Iraq, those European courts are going to say give us probable cause, show us, one, that it was Saddam Hussein's money, and link it to wrongdoing, and if they can't do that, there are going to be problems in the courts in Europe. There have already been problems in the search for bin Laden's money. Swiss and German courts in particular have got very frustrated with demands coming from Washington to freeze certain assets without much evidence showing that that money is linked to bin Laden.

KAGAN: What about some of the Iraqi officials who have been taken into custody? Any clues there, like from the former finance minister?

DETTMER: Well, there could well be, of course. Hikmat al- Azzawi, the former finance minister, and Barzan al-Tikriti, who is the half-brother of Saddam, were heavily involved in this rather far-flung Byzantine financial empire. The finance minister was involved in helping Saddam get around economic sanctions of the 1990s, and his half-brother was involved in quite a lot of overseeing of the offshore bank accounts.

But there are two points there. One, Saddam was a suspicious guy, and he divided by -- he ruled by dividing his inner circle in many ways. So -- there will be no one person who knows all the secrets. Secondly, we don't know how much either of those two are giving in terms of information to U.S. authorities now. It's going to be a painstaking operation, basically, of looking at companies they already know about, bank accounts they already suspect, and looking in any records they can get from the Central Bank in Iraq.

KAGAN: Sounds like it's going to take many years to figure out as much as they can, and probably we'll never know.

DETTMER: Many years, and many years ensnared in the courts, I suspect.

KAGAN: Yes. Absolutely. Jamie Dettmer from "Insight," great piece. Thank you.

DETTMER: Thank you very much.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com