Safa al-Habobi

Safa Haji al-Habobi was the director general of one of the weapons plants of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, the Nassr State Enterprise, and "a director at several Iraqi front companies, including TDG and the British and U.S. branches of Matrix Churchill." Representative Henry B. Gonzalez described the ministry's buying organization, the Al-Arabi Trading Company of Baghdad, as nominally private and in fact run from day to day by al-Habobi, "one of Hussein Kamil's former Secret Security Organization cronies." Its London holding company, the Technology Development Group, bought Matrix Churchill in 1987, and its Paris arm, Babil International, was listed in his name.¹²

On June 14, 1989, his network contracted with SerVaas Inc. of Indianapolis for a brass recovery plant, financed like its other American purchases by the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. The indictment returned in Atlanta on February 28, 1991, against the branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, named al-Habobi as a defendant with Sadik Taha and Abdul Munim Rasheed of the Central Bank of Iraq and Raja Hassan Ali of the ministry.¹²

Al-Habobi told Paul Henderson, the managing director of Matrix Churchill, who was reporting to British intelligence, "not only that Rome was fully aware of the Atlanta loans but that these were an extension of a government-to-government agreement between Italy and Iraq." Saddam Hussein named him oil minister in the summer of 1993.¹