Claudia Rosett does what she does best!

Awesome investigator Claudia Rosett covered the Oil-For-Food trial of Houston oilman (and major DNC donor) Oscar Wyatt, and caught his eye after the guilty verdict:

Brushing past me on his way out of the courtroom -- he's clearly familiar with my writing on the subject -- he shot a remark: "You ought to be happy."

That's got to be almost as cool as the time she went to Cyprus and had turkish coffee with her Oil-for-Food archnemesis Benon Sevan.

Stuff like that makes me want to be a real, full-time journalist.

Read the whole thing and note how she ends up:

In Switzerland, however, two of Wyatt's former business associates and alleged co-conspirators indicted in New York, Catalina Miguel and Mohammed Saidji, appear to be going freely about their business. One of the firms with which they have both been associated, Sarenco, is an active enterprise in Geneva, with Mr. Saidji's name on the registry documents.

I had no problem reaching Mr. Saidji there this week by phone. Before hanging up he told me, "I cannot answer any questions. I cannot make any comments." That is the kind of response worth keeping in mind as we now entrust our national security to U.N. sanctions on Iran.

Now, I'm going to quibble with one fact in Rosett's account:

Wyatt is the first major Oil for Food contractor -- anywhere -- to face a jury in open court. His weeks on trial brought the most vivid glimpses yet into the labyrinth of graft and greed in the U.N. program, operating from 1996-2003, that was meant to allow Saddam Hussein to sell oil solely to relieve suffering in his country.

Technically true, but it looks like French journalist Marc Francelet (whom I blogged about here) was at the least a grantee under Oil-for-Food, and he was going to prison. He wasn't in a jury trial but they don't have those in France. There was a long and messy examination by a judge, in which all sorts of interesting things came out:

Now Marc Francelet, a colourful paparazzo turned businessman and newspaper tipster, has swapped the champagne and canapes for prison rations - the latest victim[*] of a massive investigation into bribes handed out by Saddam Hussein.

But the inquiry is revealing more than the shady underside of France's dealings with the Iraqi dictator. Next week Francelet, 60, facing charges of having received a bond worth a million barrels of Iraqi oil from Saddam, will be questioned regarding accusations that he placed articles favourable to a variety of individuals, possibly including Saddam, in the press.

'It's a very public washing of some very dirty journalistic laundry,' one senior French editor said. 'No one is looking forward to it.'

I'm trying to figure out what happened with Francelet, and whether he actually went to jail. I've done some google-translation on French documents but I'm not finding anything more current. If you're interested in background, though, take a look at this entry in Le Figaro from 2006 (translated here) that lays out the charges against him and several other Frenchmen.

If any of JYB's Francophone readers knows what's up with Francelet, please leave a note in the comments.

* "victim" of the Oil-for-Food investigation? Why yes, they did say that. It's the Guardian, after all.