Richer than Bill Gates?

Jesus how Rich is this guy? From AP.

JEWAD HASHEM, Iraq’s planning minister in the late 1960s and early ’70s who now lives in Canada, said that 5 percent of oil revenues was ordered deposited abroad in accounts under Saddam’s supervision when Iraq nationalized its oil industry in 1972.

Hashem’s assertion is in his autobiography, which is being excerpted in the Asharq Al-Awsat pan-Arab daily. In Wednesday’s except, he wrote that Iraq’s former Revolutionary Command Council issued the decree to create a sort of war chest for Saddam’s Baath Party.

There was no way to independently confirm Hashem’s story. International efforts are under way to track accounts around the world in the name of Saddam, the Baath Party and other former Iraqi officials.

Hashem wrote that Saddam told him and some other ministers that “the Baath Party has come to rule for 300 years and to continue ruling or to come back to rule if toppled by a coup, (and therefore) the party must have a huge amount of money outside Iraq.”

The former minister said Saddam told them that the party did not want to repeat the mistake of 1963 when a military coup toppled the first Baath government after nine months and it could not return to power quickly because it lacked money.

Hashem said that by his calculation the 5 percent revenues from 1972 until 1990 would amount to $31 billion. After 1990, United Nations sanctions following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait blocked the free transfer of money abroad.

"Hello,

I am the Nigerian oil minister and I need help moving 100 Billion dollars US from my bank in Switzerland and I will gladly give you half......"

Now we can add Iraqi oil minister to our spam filters

what was the deal with those e-mails a got a bunch of them from like African banking people and what not, i just deleated them, but never quite understood the scheme....

acp26b: Its a scamm they try and get you to give them your bank acountnumber then clear it out. Unfortuintly what they are doing is compleatly legal in nigeria, occasionaly some of the scammers are caught overseas but most of them are safe in africa.

About the scams:

Also, some scammers would persuade you to come down to their country, then they would kidnap you.