Oil-for-Food Witness Receives Lenient Sentence

An Iraqi-American businessman who admitted helping Saddam Hussein's government in the oil-for-food scandal was fined $300,000 and sentenced to probation by a judge who said he provided substantial assistance to the U.S. government after his arrest.

"He was a terrific witness," U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said yesterday as he bestowed leniency on Samir Vincent, who otherwise would have faced a sentence of at least five years in prison.

Vincent, a 67-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Annandale, Va., testified at two trials, including one that was interrupted when Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt Jr. pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Vincent, an oil trader, had occasionally accompanied Wyatt on his meetings with high-ranking Iraqi officials.

Wyatt was sentenced last year to a year and a day in prison.

The judge said he agreed with the government that the oil-for-food cases could not have been made without the involvement of Vincent, who was a decathlete on Iraq's 1964 Olympics team.

Vincent was the first person charged in the federal probe of the program, which operated between 1996 and 2003 to provide humanitarian relief to Iraq's people, who were suffering from the effects of economic sanctions imposed on Saddam's regime after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Before he was sentenced, he told the judge he was "ashamed and sorry." He said he hoped to "regain the trust of a country that has been so good to me." He promised he would never make such a mistake again.

"I've learned my lesson, your honor," Vincent said.

Edward O'Callaghan, chief of the U.S. attorney's Terrorism and National Security office, told the judge Vincent's remorse "is sincere."

"It is not hyperbole to state that without Vincent's cooperation, the government's OFFP (oil-for-food program) investigations may not have resulted in criminal charges and its prosecutions would not have resulted in convictions," Mr. O'Callaghan wrote in court papers.

Prosecutors had accused Vincent of operating on direct instructions from Saddam's government between 1992 and 2003 and delivering an Iraqi intelligence service message in November 2001 to a former U.S. official regarding Iraq's position on readmission of weapons inspectors and on weakening the sanctions.