MIDWAY TRADING IS A MESSED UP COMPANY... MORE OIL-FOR-FOOD BRIBES

I'd say Midway Trading is worse than Scientigo on the ethical and likability totum pole. They lined the pockets of Iraqi officials to get the rights to sell $42 million worth of Iraqi oil. Greedy, unethical, unprincipled bastards. I hope the $250,000 fine isn't all they get. The management deserves to go to jail.

A Virginia company admitted in state Supreme Court in New York that it paid $440,000 in kickbacks to Iraqi officials as part of the United Nations "oil-for-food" program.

Midway Trading, based in Reston, Virginia, pleaded guilty to grand larceny charges and agreed to pay a $250,000 fine, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said today.

"The oil-for-food program was set up as a way for the Iraqi people to receive humanitarian goods and not to line the pockets of the ruling party," Morgenthau said.

Created by the U.N. Security Council as an exemption to sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the program allowed Iraq's former dictator, Saddam Hussein, to sell $64 billion worth of oil from 1996 until the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Hussein skimmed more than $17 billion from the program through oil smuggling and graft involving humanitarian goods, U.S. congressional investigators said in November.

Morgenthau said Midway won the right in late 2000 to buy $42 million worth of oil from Iraq through Bulf Oil, a Romanian company, as part of the oil-for-food program. He said Midway funneled the bribes to Iraqi government officials through a Bulf employee. (full article)