NEW YORK, July 13: A US federal court jury found South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park guilty of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Iraq and money-laundering on Thursday for his role in the UN oil-for-food scandal.
He faces up to five years in prison when sentenced in October.
The jury deliberated for less than a day after closing arguments concluded on Wednesday.
It was the first US federal trial related to the UN oil-for-food programme, which had been designed to help provide humanitarian relief to Iraq while it was under international sanctions for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The $67 billion programme was marred by corruption, investigators say, with one UN and several Iraqi officials enriching themselves through kickbacks to arrange oil sales.
Officials, companies or politicians from some 40 countries were implicated, according to a panel headed by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who was commissioned by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to investigate.
Saddam bilked the programme out of $1.8 billion and then earned another estimated $8 billion by selling oil outside the scheme, Volcker’s probe found.
Park, 71, previously had gained notoriety in the 1970s as a lobbyist who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to members of Congress as part of an influence-peddling scandal.—Reuters
