Desmarais Volcker Power

It is looking more and more like the Volcker Committee report is going to be a white wash.

There are two major conflicts of interest in Mr. Volcker's resume.

#1. He was a major supporter of the UN. Probably got paid for it too. from: Friends of Saddam

When Volcker was appointed to head the Oil-for-Food investigation in April 2004, it was not widely known to the general public, the world’s media, or the U.S. Congress that he was at the time a director of the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) and the Business Council for the United Nations. Mr. Volcker is listed as a director in the 2003-2004 UNA-USA annual report,[3] as well as the annual reports for 2001-2002 and 2000-2001.[4]The UNA-USA’s partner organization, the Business Council for the United Nations (BCUN), works to “advance the common interests of the U.N. and business in a more prosperous and peaceful world.” One of its chief underwriters was BNP Paribas, the French bank that held the escrow account for Oil-for-Food funds.[9] BNP donated more than $100,000 to UNA-USA and BCUN in 2002 to 2003.[10] BNP’s role in the Oil-for-Food scandal is currently being investigated by the House International Relations Committee,[11] as well as by the Volcker Committee.

#2. He worked for Paul Desmarais through a company called Power. Mark Steyn comments on a piece of this here: Steyn on Desmarais.

most Canadians don’t know Paul Desmarais at all. You could stop the first thousand people walking down Yonge Street and I’ll bet no one would know who he is. But the few who do know him know him as the kingmaker behind Trudeau, Mulroney, Chrétien and Martin. Jean Chrétien’s daughter is married to Paul Desmarais’s son. Paul Martin was an employee of M. Desmarais’s Power Corp., and his Canada Steamship Lines was originally a subsidiary of Power Corp. that M. Desmarais put Mr. Martin in charge of. In other words, Paul Martin’s public identity--successful self-made businessman, not just a career pol, knows how to meet payroll, etc.--is entirely derived from the patronage of M. Desmarais.

Now here is a bit on the relationship of Volcker to Power from: Myopic Zeal.

Potential conflict of interest number one for Volcker is the fact he held a seat on Power Corporation’s international advisory board.

Wealthy Canadian businessman and Power Corporation founder, Paul Desmarais Sr. is a major shareholder and director in TotalFinaElf, the largest oil corporation in France, which has held tens of billions of dollars in contracts with the deposed regime of Saddam Hussein

Interestingly enough Desmarais may be implicated in the current Liberal Party scandal being discussed at Captains's Quarters.

From a 2003 report at: PaulMartinTime.

This past weekend, in a supreme display of the influence he has accumulated in his 52 years as an operator in the business world, Desmarais summoned dozens of notables from business, politics and entertainment to his newly completed $40-million (estimated) spread in Quebec’s spectacular Charlevoix region. The guest list was kept extremely hush-hush — another testament to Desmarais’s power. The above-mentioned names were only rumored, but no matter, any one of them would fit comfortably into Desmarais’ wide circle of friends from around the world.

That circle includes the three longest-serving prime ministers of the last 35 years, Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien. Chretien’s daughter France married Andre, one of Desmarais’s two sons, making that circle a little tighter than others. Desmarais’s right-hand man at Power Corp. is John Rae, a long-time Chretien advisor and the man who ran two of the three election campaigns that brought Liberals majority governments since 1993.

Desmarais is also on pretty close terms with the prime minister-in-waiting, Paul Martin, who, after all, employed him at Power Corp. for many years. In 1981 he sold to Martin Power’s shipping line, Canada Steamship Lines, which Martin grew into the largest shipper of its kind in the world before entering politics. (Martin last month transferred ownership of CSL to his three sons to free himself for the Liberal leadership campaign which ends in November.)

And here is some interesting stuff on Power Corp. from the Key Monk.

the Fox News story wasn’t prompted by an announcement from Power of some billion-dollar takeover or the appointment of a new senior executive. It was something altogether different: the revelation that the man handpicked by the UN secretary general last April to probe the UN’s scandalized Oil-for-Food program, Paul Volcker, had not disclosed to the UN that he was a paid adviser to Power Corp., a story which had originally been broken by a small, independent Toronto newspaper, the Canada Free Press. Why did the highest-rated cable channel in the U.S. care? Because the more that Americans came to know about Oil-for-Food, which has been called the largest corruption scandal in history, the more the name of this little-known Montreal firm kept popping up. And the more links that seemed to emerge between Power Corp. and individuals or organizations involved in the Oil-for-Food scandal, the more Fox News and other news outlets sniffing around this story began to ask questions about who, exactly, this Power Corp. is. And, they wanted to know, what, if anything, did Power have to do with a scandal in which companies around the world took bribes to help a murderous dictator scam billions of dollars in humanitarian aid out of the UN while his people suffered and starved?