Jordanian Royal Implicated in War Profiteering By Republican Insider

The New York Times reports on a scandal in which the Pentagon was overcharged on fuel deliveries to US forces in Iraq. The interesting part is not that a corrupt McCain fundraiser, Harry Sargeant III, was involved- it was the complicity of Mohammad al-Saleh, husband of Princess Alia Bint al-Hussein of Jordan, the older half-sister of King Abdullah II, who may have gotten the Jordanian state to block other bidders from making deliveries through its territory. And then, he apparently got burned.

I'm not holding my breath for a proper parliamentary investigation of this corruption of Jordan's state institutions.

To further complicate matters, Sargeant apparently had a third business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba'a, who "collected checks" from McCain campaign contributors. Mr. Abu Naba'a, who owns a third of the company supplying fuel to the Air Force, is a citizen of Jordan and the Dominican Republic, and therefore this activity may have violated campaign finance law.

Many of the donations collected by Mr. Abu Naba'a came from a single extended family, the Abdullahs, who live in western Riverside County in California. Abdullahs also donated to Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, who was reportedly a fraternity brother of Sargeant's in college.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/world/middleeast/17fuel.html?ref=us (excerpt of important part):

The contracting company, called the International Oil Trading Company, or I.O.T.C., was briefly in the news over the summer when a former partner filed a lawsuit against Mr. Sargeant in a Florida circuit court.

The former partner, a Jordanian named Mohammad al-Saleh, is a brother-in-law of King Abdullah II of Jordan. The court papers laid out his assertion that he obtained special governmental authorizations for the company to transport the fuel through Jordan and was then unlawfully forced out by Mr. Sargeant, who strongly disputed those allegations.

But the latest claims of impropriety by the company, presented by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, go much further. Mr. Waxman uses e-mail messages, company documents, Pentagon reports and other information to make the case that Mr. Sargeant repeatedly received contracts to deliver the fuel even though his company was not the lowest bidder.

In one case, the letter from Mr. Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asserts that Mr. Sargeant’s company submitted the highest of six bids, but received the contract anyway. In fact, Pentagon contracting officers complained that the company’s prices were unreasonably high and initially said they could not justify giving the work to Mr. Sargeant.

But for reasons the company was never able to explain, Mr. Waxman’s letter indicates, no other American company was given an authorization to transport the fuel through Jordan. And when the United States Central Command declared that the need for the fuel was urgent, the Pentagon was forced to award the contract to Mr. Sargeant’s company.