Oilman Pleads Guilty in Iraq Case
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A Texas oilman, Oscar Wyatt, pleaded guilty today to charges that he paid millions of dollars to Iraqi officials to illegally win contracts connected to the U.N. oil-for-food program.
Mr. Wyatt, 83, is accused of secretly obtaining oil from Iraq in the 1990s after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War led to sanctions meant to isolate Iraq from the rest of the world. If convicted, he could face more than 60 years in prison.
The U.N. oil-for-food program, set up to finance Iraqi imports of necessities, became corrupted in 2000 when Iraqi officials began demanding illegal surcharges in return for contracts to buy Iraqi oil. The program ran from 1996 to 2003.
Prosecutors said Mr. Wyatt paid millions of dollars in surcharges to Iraq, part of hundreds of millions of dollars collected illegally by Iraqi leaders that should have gone to humanitarian needs.
During the trial, prosecutors demonstrated that Mr. Wyatt had such a close relationship with Iraq that he was able to meet personally with Saddam Hussein in December 1990 to argue for the release of Americans being held as potential shields in the event of an American-Iraq war.
Prosecutors played a tape for the jury of the conversation in which Hussein promised Mr. Wyatt that Americans would be released as Mr. Wyatt and a former Texas governor, John Connally, spoke sympathetically about Iraq’s plight.
The government insisted that Mr. Wyatt later took advantage of that relationship to secure the first contract under the oil-for-food program and to continue to receive oil deals after other American companies were shut off prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Mr. Wyatt’s defense lawyers argued that their client was an American hero who never knowingly paid surcharges to the Iraqi government to win oil deals. They also said he tried to play a peaceful role in resolving conflict between the two countries.
In his 1990 talk with Hussein, Mr. Wyatt could be heard telling Saddam that he had visited Iraq as many as 40 times in the previous 15 years and that he was “largely responsible” for a lot of the transactions in which Iraqis sold one-third of their oil exports to America.
