The testimony about cash just keeps rolling in. It has now rolled as far as those checks to "M. Strong." Friday the prosecution called to the stand a Jordanian branch bank manager, a woman named Rima Elias Azzouni, who testified under oath that in September, 1997, Tongsun Park walked into her bank in the Jordanian capital of Amman, opened an account, and deposited into it $700,000 in U.S. $100 banknotes, much of it bundled in wrappers with markings of the Iraqi government's Al Rafidain Bank.
Azzouni, a lively middle-aged woman with shoulder-length auburn-streaked dark hair, was brought to New York from Amman by the prosecution, specifically to appear as a witness at this trial. Testifying in Arabic, through a court interpreter, she said that she has worked in Amman for the Housing Bank for Trade and Finance for the past 21 years. Under direct questioning, she then described in detail two sets of transactions that took place in 1997 (both apparently the same transactions discussed in far less detail in the Sept. 7, 2005 report by Paul Volcker's probe into Oil-for-Food).
The first, according to Azzouni's testimony, took place on July 30, 1997, when a man with an Iraqi passport, Hammam Rashid Humaym, came into her branch bank, opened an account in his own name and deposited into it "$991,000 American dollars." That same day, Humaym had issued from the account a check made out to "Mr. M. Strong." (This appears to have been the Jordanian bank check that Volcker alleges was delivered to Maurice Strong in New York the following week, who endorsed it over to a business associate Theodore Kheel — who deposited it on August 5, 1997. Strong told the Volcker committee he did not know that the funds might have come from Iraq, and said he regarded the check as payment for an investment Park wished to make in a Strong family company. Strong was working at the time with the rank of Under-Secretary-General as chief architect for Secretary-General Kofi Annan's 1997 reforms at the U.N.).
In opening the account, Humaym provided a phone number, 614191, testified Azzouni, which was the same phone number provided by Park, when less than two months later he walked into Azzouni's bank branch and opened an account under the name T.S. Park. The government showed the jury copies of bank documents with the matching phone numbers, and relevant names and signatures. Azzouni further testified that having deposited $700,000 in cash, on Sept. 14, 1997, Park returned to her bank office later that same day, and had four checks issued on his new account. The jury was shown bank documentation for all four checks:
One for $30,000 to "M. Strong"
One for $45,000 to "CMDC Corp."
One for $500,000 to "Suter's Tavern Inc."
and one to Park himself, to buy $50,000 worth of traveler's checks, denominated in thousands.
Challenged under cross examination by the defense as to how she could recall any of the details as clearly as her testimony suggested, Azzouni testified her signature was on the bank documents, and that Park stood out in her mind, "First of all because the amount was large. And also a Korean nationality, it was the first time I had seen it."
