Iraq contractor's wife Jacqueline Battles arrested for money laundering

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BERLIN - The wife of an American contractor accused of cheating the U.S. government in Iraq was arrested in Germany on suspicion of money laundering, a prosecutor said Monday.

Jacqueline Battles, a German citizen, was detained after a German bank informed authorities about “suspicious transactions” on her accounts two months ago, prosecutor David Kirkpatrick told The Associated Press.

German investigators seized about $1 million in suspect funds from the accounts, said Kirkpatrick, a prosecutor in the German city of Darmstadt.

“She is in investigative custody,” Kirkpatrick said in a telephone interview. The woman, who lives near Darmstadt, has not been formally charged.

In March, a U.S. jury ordered contractors Mike Battles and Scott Custer to pay $10 million for swindling the U.S. government over Iraqi rebuilding projects in connection with their Middletown, R.I.-based company, Custer Battles LLC.

more: http://news.bostonherald.com/international/view.bg?articleid=158149

[gratuitous]

1. Another isolated incident of naked corruption

None of them can be tied to each other, and there's no reason to believe that Mrs. Battles is connected to Mr. Battles, or that either of them are joined at the hip with any GOP corruption like Ney or DeLay, and of course, none of this has anything to do with Enron or Arthur Andersen.

All these well-connected Republicans just seem to have the worst luck, darn it all!

[bigtree]

3. she wasn't trying to launder the money, she was just resting it

in several bank accounts under her maiden name of Vihernik.
It was all tuckered out from running from the judge who ordered $10mil to be paid back to the government. Whe they claimed they didn't have any money left to pay, they meant the didn't have it there . . . handy.

[babylonsister]

2. Isn't Custer Battles the company that supposedly 'lost' all that

money in Iraq/could not explain where it went?

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/41083/

No. 5: Custer Battles

In March, Custer Battles became the first Iraq occupation contractor to be found guilty of fraud. A jury ordered the company to pay more than $10 million in damages for 37 counts of fraud, including false billing. In August, however, the judge in the case dismissed most of the charges on a technicality, ruling that since the Coalition Provisional Authority was not strictly part of the U.S. government, there is no basis for the claim under U.S. law. Custer Battles' attorney Robert Rhoad says the company's owners were "ecstatic" about the decision, adding that "there simply was no evidence of fraud or an intent to defraud."

In fact the judge's ruling stated that the company had submitted "false and fraudulently inflated invoices." He also allowed the jury's verdict to stand against the company for retaliating against the whistleblowers that originally brought the case under the False Claims Act, the law that allows citizens to initiate a private right of action to recover money on taxpayers' behalf. During the trial, retired Brig. Gen. Hugh Tant III testified that the fraud "was probably the worst I've ever seen in my 30 years in the Army."

When Tant confronted Mike Battles, one of the company's owners, with the fact that 34 of 36 trucks supplied by the firm didn't work, he responded: "You asked for trucks and we complied with our contract and it is immaterial whether the trucks were operational."

The Custer Battles case is being watched closely by the contracting community, since many other fraud cases could hinge on the outcome. A backlog of 70 fraud cases is pending against various contractors. Who they are is anyone's guess (one case was recently settled against Halliburton subcontractor EGL for $4 million), since cases filed under the False Claims Act are sealed and prevented from moving forward until the government decides whether or not it will join the case. The means some companies accused of fraud have yet to be publicly identified, which makes it difficult for federal contracting officers to suspend or debar them from any new contracts. The U.S. Air Force moved to suspend Custer Battles from new contracts in September 2004, after the alleged fraud was revealed.

In May, however, the Wall Street Journal reported that attempts were made to bypass the suspension order by two former top Navy officials who had formed a company that purchased the remnants of Custer Battles. Meanwhile, Alan Grayson, the attorney who filed the Custer Battles case, says that because of orders passed by the CPA, Iraqis have no chance of recovering any of the $20 billion in Iraqi money used to pay U.S. contractors. The CPA effectively created a "free fraud zone," Grayson says.

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4. bingo

they're busted . . . again

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5. caught with our money in hand

[NOLADEM]

6. Ha Ha

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9. carpetbaggers

[louis-t]

7. Who in this admin have ties to this company?

C'mon, there's always BFEE ties when one of these criminal enterprises gets caught.

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8. ex-Navy officials

just a couple of puke republican suck ups- the only qualification they needed according to the WaPo report this weeekend.

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10. .

[tnlefty]

11. I'll kick it for ya.

I too damned disgusted to much of anything else!!!

[slaveplanet]

12. C/B are small fry,

rupuke opportunistic bottom feeders that zoomed to Iraq, much the way flies zoom to shit.

They're going to make an example out of these vermin just for appearances, but they'll let the slimy big fish keep bilking the American public to the end. If there is an end?

[bigtree]

13. I love this kind of response

tell me you're not just signing on here to dismiss this. How do we expect folks to care at all if we don't highlight these smaller fish?

[slaveplanet]

14. nope

it's the truth, listen to NPR sometime. Custer and Battles are just a couple of pikers, basically broke fools, who gambled and showed up in iraq without 2 nickles to rub together. They were there at the right place and time to get the security contract even though they basically had no employees or armaments to perform security duties.(mostly because there was no one else who showed up for the airport contract, they got it by default), they managed to throw a half assed security detail together, then started pushing for other contracts they knew they could never fulfill, all the while red flags were already being raised about the airport contract.

They're low level grifters.

The msm loves outlining this stuff because it gives the impression that everything is now on the up and up because look how they're catching all the bad guys.

It's much like when the DEA busts low level smugglers and then the media parrot The great victory all over the MSM. In reality the DEA is just busting the competition of the sanctioned smugglers.
Shame on those bottom feeders, they ought to have greased a few more palms. In the real world, that was their big mistake.