Just weeks after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration began airlifting planeloads of cash to Baghdad for use by US occupation officials. $12 billion in US currency was shipped in just over a year. But where did the money go? To date, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for.
Under the terms of C.P.A. Regulation No. 2, signed by Bremer on June 15, 2003, money coming into Iraq was supposed to be tracked by an ‘independent certified public accounting firm.’
The firm the C.P.A. appointed, in a $1.4m contract, was called NorthStar Consultants. NorthStar is run from a two-story house in La Jolla California; its owners, Thomas A. and Konsuelo Howell, are not certified public accountants; nor are any of their employees. The company was incorporated in the Bahamas, and operates as an ‘International Business Company’, without public financial statements. Its legal home is a P.O. Box in Nassau, which it shares with the notorious mutual fund Evergreen. When a request was made to the U.S. government for a copy of NorthStar’s contract, officials at the Pentagon, which has oversight, dragged their feet for weeks. The document they eventually supplied had been strategically redated. Nearly all the information about the contractor had been blacked out, including the name and title of the company officer who had executed the contract, the name of the person to call for information about the company, the last four digits of the company’s phone number, and the name of the U.S.-government official who had awarded the contract in the first place.
Back in 1990, there was a mutual fund, so to speak, in the Bahamas called Evergreen Security, which was selling its certificates around the world, especially in the US. Evergreen Security had been run for the most part by Patrick Thomson, a resident of the Bahamas. It was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, and in the end more than $200 million disappeared.
One of ‘Directors’ was William J. Zylka, a New Jersey "con artist who falsified his background, credentials and wealth in order to perpetrate elaborate schemes," according to court documents. He pocketed $27.7 million of Evergreen’s money.
Well, it was to Mr. Thomson that Thomas Howell in La Jolla, California, turned to create a company for him called Northstar Consultants. Northstar Consultants was awarded the contract by the Pentagon to make sure the reconstruction money, ($12 billion) for Iraq, does not go missing. Unfortunately $9 billion is now unaccounted for.