Federal investigators are searching for suspicious transactions in the personal bank records of a retired Army colonel who ran the contracting office in Baghdad during the early stages of Iraq's $125 billion reconstruction.
The focus on Anthony B. Bell opens a window into the scope of a long-running inquiry of fraud and corruption that's gathering steam even as U.S. forces are beginning to leave the country.
While contracting procedures and oversight in Iraq have improved dramatically in recent years, that hasn't slowed investigators trying to piece together the scale of corruption that undermined the largest nation-building effort in U.S. history.
Bell is suspected by investigators of being a key figure in a loosely connected network of U.S. officials who allegedly steered contracts to companies that paid them millions of dollars in return.
According to federal court records, the special inspector general's office was told by an anonymous source in 2004 that Bell had allegedly accepted kickbacks on reconstruction contracts. The records do not specify the contracts or give the amounts of the payments.
In a telephone interview with The Associated Press, Bell said he has no problem with the investigators looking through his records. "I will gladly go to court with them anytime they want to bring me to court," he said.
As chief of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority's contracting office from June 2003 to March 2004, Bell managed a critical arm of the U.S. presence in Iraq. The office awarded scores of contracts quickly to get the country back on its feet. At the time, there was almost no oversight on how huge sums of cash were being spent, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
That office, known as SIGIR, is involved in the current investigation along with the Justice Department, the Army Criminal Investigation Command and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
