<a href=www.dailytelegraph.co.uk>By Alice Thomson (Filed: 29/03/2003)

It's 3.30pm at Terminal 2, Heathrow. The arrivals lounge is full of rugby players, businessmen, a stag party, the traffic of a Friday afternoon. In the middle stands a man with ruddy cheeks and gnarled hands, looking like a Dutch bulb grower in his crumpled suit.

He may look innocuous but, in the next week, Carel de Rooy will be meeting presidents, prime ministers, ministers, princes and paupers in his quest to raise £106 million. As Unicef's representative for Iraq, he will be flying on to Brussels, Geneva, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and France to plead for money for Iraq's 12 million children in the charity's largest ever emergency appeal.

"The Irish," he says, "have been fantastic in their support. The French are the least interested." London, where he is meeting Clare Short, is his second stop.

"Less than a week ago I was in Baghdad's marketplace searching for bread," he says. "I don't know when I'll go back. I've left 200 of my staff there, delivering babies, trying to keep water flowing, building latrines in camps, distributing £2 million of high-protein biscuits and milk formula, inoculating as many children as we can."

The remaining staff, all Iraqis, are trying to ignore the war as they check the orphanages and the generators that they have installed in the water treatment plants. Meanwhile, Mr de Rooy has flown to Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iran and Kuwait in the last four days, setting up camps in case refugees flee over the borders.

"If the support doesn't come we'll have a catastrophe of unforeseeable dimensions," says the Dutchman. "Nearly 1.7 million people have been without water for four days in Basra and we're already seeing a thin column of refugees crossing the river. It's like watching a colony of ants on the move after someone has stepped on their nest: weary but determined. I get that sickening feeling . . . here we go again."

Mr de Rooy, who is 51, has worked in Colombia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Brazil and Ivory Coast. "Iraq is different," he says. "Seventy per cent of the population is urban. They don't have a plot of land to grow tomatoes or keep chickens. They are used to a higher level of comfort - running water and electricity. There are few wells to keep them going.

"Almost all of them have become reliant on state hand-outs to eat; now they are stuck. There is five weeks of food left in the country. This is not about the reconstruction of Iraq - it's about survival."

Nearly 80 per cent of Iraqis are partly dependent on the oil-for-food programme; more than 60 per cent receive all their food from the state. "Twenty-three per cent of children are chronically malnourished already. If they get diarrhoea, they may die."

Mr de Rooy has spent two years in Baghdad. "There's been a crisis here since 1985, with the Iran/Iraq war. Then, there was the invasion of Kuwait that sucked the country dry, and after that sanctions.

"In the mid-1980s a professional would earn about 120 dinar a month, and about three per cent of that would be spent on protein. Now they earn 1,500 dinar but two chickens cost almost that much. That means instead of eating protein every day, they may have it three times a year. So 60 per cent of the women now have anaemia, half of all newborn babies have a low birth rate, 20 per cent of pregnancies go wrong."

The statistics are reeled off with dizzying speed. "Only countries such as Mozambique have worse rates of respiratory infections and chronic malnutrition among small children - and they have to contend with Aids. Over the last 10 years alone child mortality in this country has risen by 160 per cent - the biggest leap in the world. One in eight under-fives now dies. Yet Iraq is the second largest oil producer in the world. It's ludicrous."

The education system has fallen apart. "Each school," says Mr de Rooy, "has three shifts, so children are taught for only two hours a day. Teachers earn $5 a month and 25 per cent of children never go to school at all. Instead, they start working at the age of five in factories or as apprentices. For girls, it is worse - more than 33 per cent of girls stay at home to help their mothers."

It makes him want to shout: "It doesn't have to be like this!" Twenty years ago, Iraq had the third highest standard of living in the Middle East, out of 16 countries. Now, it has dropped to the bottom of the league.

But Mr de Rooy insists that he is still optimistic. "Iraq is a very secular state, and quite tolerant. These used to be educated, sophisticated people with a cosmopolitan view of the world. There is still a large middle class, even if they are starving.

"I have great friends in Baghdad - engineers, architects, bankers - all desperate to work. Some of the four million who emigrated might return. Iraq has the money from oil. It has a chance."

Baghdad, he says, may now be a dilapidated city, but it still has a sense of dignity. "You see that picture on television of the ragged skyline but you don't see the people below, desperately trying to keep their rooms clean and their families washed. There are few cafes left, but they are amazingly hospitable on their small piece of floor."

Iraqis, he says, are not corrupt. "They were called the Germans of the Arab world - they are naturally very straight and strict. I grew up in Latin America, so I know all about corruption. In Iraq, they don't steal the rations we supply. The country can recover quickly: it's got good people, spirit and resources."

He is too nervous to comment about the war in case it jeopardises the work of his team still in Baghdad, but he was in New York on September 11 and as soon as the war against terrorism began, he thought: Saddam's had it.

"My family were in Iraq but I got them out last year. My 15-year-old wasn't frightened but he wasn't learning anything with only two hours of school a day, so I sent them back to Brazil where I grew up. I saw my wife and my children at the beginning of January, but I'm not sure if I'll see them again this year.

"After this fund-raising, I'll go straight back to Iraq. I do feel bad that my family takes second priority but the Iraqi children have to come first."

His nightmare is that if the war intensifies, not only will he be unable to return but children will start dying from malnutrition and diarrhoea. "Then, there will be no point in discussing a future for Iraq. The oil-for-food programme has got to be reinstated. It was a disaster because it made the people dependent on Saddam but now it is all they have."

Both his parents fled Rotterdam after being bombed during the war. "My parents came from relatively privileged backgrounds but I have enormous sympathy for refugees," he says. "If possible, it is always better to help them remain in their own homes; otherwise, they will never feel they belong anywhere."

At university, he studied geology and specialised in water treatment, which led him to Unicef. "I found myself in remote villages, building wells in Africa. I became hooked on helping the vulnerable."

Working with Unicef after the earthquake in Colombia, the floods in Venezuela, the famine in Ivory Coast and the earthquake in El Salvador must have prepared him well for any disaster.

"They were all natural disasters - we just got on with it," he points out. "This is far more tortuous - it's a man-made hell. It is hundreds of earthquakes, thousands of volcanoes.

"This is like watching an earthquake and then being forced to sit on your hands while children and women are slowly, silently smothered to death over a decade."

Donations can be made by phone (08457 312312) or online at www.unicef.org.uk

28 March 2003: Attempts to deliver aid 'a disaster' 28 March 2003: Thousands flee from Basra 26 March 2003: UN wrangles halt aid appeal as Iraqis' food stocks dwindle 26 February 2003: Two million Iraqis could become refugees, says US 26 March 2003: UN wrangles halt aid appeal as Iraqis' food stocks dwindle 25 March 2003: UN ready to heal rifts with vote on oil-for-food aid External links     Unicef

Web Saturday, March 29, 2003 By Christopher Toothaker / Associated Press Gregorio Marrero / Associated Press

Jesus Barrios poses with the CD-ROM game he invented called "Politikal Kombat" in Caracas, Venezuela. Some Venezuelans are trading street politics for the computer version. Gregorio Marrero / Associated Press A military soldier and an opposition politician are seen fighting in the CD-ROM game "Politikal Kombat." Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery CARACAS, Venezuela -- Wham! President Hugo Chavez delivers a jarring left to opposition leader Carlos Ortega. Pow! Ortega recovers with a blow to the groin. Crowds cheer as a police helicopter hovers overhead. After a tough year including a coup, street protests and a damaging general strike, some Venezuelans are releasing stress by playing a CD-ROM game called "Politikal Kombat." More than 2,000 people have snapped up copies since February. That's good numbers by Venezuelan standards, much to the delight of the game's 35-year-old creator, Jesus Barrios. Even the presidential palace bought a copy, Barrios said. "I think it was so they could check if the images in the game offended the figure of the president or ruling party members in any way," he said. "We haven't received any feedback, so I imagine there was no problem." Barrios said pro- and anti-Chavez lawmakers are playing the game, which retails for $18. Twelve protagonists -- including images of Chavez, whose character wears military fatigues -- fight "for the country's virtual destiny," the game says. All have an equal chance of winning because "we didn't want to be accused of favoring one side or the other," Barrios said. In real life, Ortega, a labor leader, went into exile Thursday in Costa Rica after directing a two-month general strike demanding early elections or Chavez's resignation. The strike fizzled out in February. Venezuela's opposition accuses Chavez of trying to impose an authoritarian regime. Chavez, who led a botched coup attempt in 1992, was first elected president in 1998. His second term ends in 2007. Barrios released the game just as the tension-ridden strike ended. "The concept is to provide a channel to relieve stress, which is the result of so much political conflict," he said. At least one opposition lawmaker -- and "Politikal Kombat" figure -- agrees. "I think it's funny. I'm a lawyer and a legislator shown in a street brawl," Deputy Geraldo Blyde said. Despite frantic kickboxing, Barrios says he wanted to avoid overt allusions to the political violence that claimed dozens of lives over the past year. "We made sure there was no blood, disfigured faces, fatalities or heads being ripped off -- just knockouts," said Barrios. A new version is in the works, featuring more protagonists in Venezuela's political scene. They include Lina Ron, a pro-Chavez street activist whose followers have attacked opposition marches, and Marta Colomina, a prominent journalist known for her stinging criticism of Chavez. Though crude by the virtual reality standards of high-tech video games, "Politikal Kombat" has touched the funny bone of Venezuelans in need of a good laugh. "It's perfect to play after watching 'Hello President' (Chavez's weekly radio show)," one player wrote on a "Politikal Kombat" Web site. "I'm going to give it to the tyrant in the mouth!" On the Net (in Spanish): www.infoofersitio.com

March 29, 2003 By Ingrid Mansell

Our correspondent looks at how the need for oil during Gulf conflicts has been the making of many a tycoon

DURING the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, John Fredriksen, the son of a modest Norwegian welder, ran tankers backwards and forwards to the huge Iranian oil port at Kharg Island.

The run was risky. And extremely lucrative.

Fredriksen emerged from the conflict with a massive personal fortune — and another billionaire shipping tycoon was born.

Nearly 20 years later, as everyone from Gordon Brown to Rod Eddington, the chief executive of British Airways, counts the mounting cost of the current war against Iraq, Fredriksen will again start counting his mounting dollars.

His group of shipping companies, which together owns more than 80 super tankers, is perfectly positioned to profit from the recent war-inspired spike in tanker rates.

As David Osler, industrial editor of Lloyd’s List, the insurance and shipping newspaper, puts it: “These are good times for the guys with the right ships. It’s at times like these that fortunes are made.”

The current shipping climate has echoes of the 1970s, when the giant tankers of the so-called “Golden Greeks”, Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos, thundered down the world’s richest oil routes, raking in tens of thousands of dollars a day for their owners.

Rates for very large crude carriers (VLCCs), which are able to carry two million barrels of oil, have skyrocketed in recent months.

In 2002 the average earnings per day for a super tanker running between the Gulf and Europe was $20,363. So far this year, the average rate is $67,425 and ship brokers are starting to get reports of rates as high as $110,845 a day.

Martin Stopford, head of research at Clarksons, the shipping group, said: “Apart from a brief spike in 2000, there has been nothing comparable to those levels since 1973.”

The rising rates mean that people are once again starting to talk of tanker shipping in terms of great wealth, rather than environmental disasters.

Fredriksen knows both sides of the industry well. While tankers delivered him his fortune, currently estimated at $1.2 billion (£765 million), they have also given him his share of woe.

It was Fredriksen’s Sea Empress, which, in 1996, was responsible for one of the worst oil spills off the British coast in recent years. The ship was relatively new and had cost $60 million. Human error was blamed for the spill near Milford Haven, which eliminated vasts numbers of different wildlife. Fredriksen’s immediate emotional response was reportedly to threaten to quit the tanker market. Aides said that he did not sleep for days while the affair was headline news.

The risk of oil spills — and the potentially huge liability associated with them — is one of the major reasons why the world’s oil majors have moved to limit their exposure to the tanker business over the past decade.

Last December Statoil, the Norwegian oil company, agreed to sell its Navion shipping unit to the New York-listed Teekay Shipping Corporation for about NKr6 billion (£520 million).

Osler says that tanker owners are a “swashbuckling” breed. “You’ve got to be a risk taker, a bit of a player” he says.

There are now 430 VLCCs on the market. These ocean-going colossi follow two major long-haul routes: they either turn left out of the Gulf towards Asia — the fastest growing market for oil — or they turn right, travel around the Cape of Good Hope, off the southwest of South Africa, and on to the United States and Europe.

Of the 430 ships, about half are “own trade”, meaning that they are either owned by oil companies, or by companies that charter them out to oil companies. The other half operate on the spot market. In other words, Stopford says: “They arrive in the Gulf and say ‘Hi, I am for hire’.”

Because time charter rates are fixed, it is the owners of vessels on the spot market that stand to rake in the biggest fortunes as the rates escalate.

Middle East conflicts have a history of being rewarding to budding shipping tycoons.

Onassis reportedly made a fortune through the Suez Crisis, when Gamel Abdel Nasser, then Egypt’s President, nationalised and blocked the Suez canal at the start of the Six-Day War on June 5, 1967.

Desperate oil producers suddenly found that they needed ships to transport oil all the way around the Horn of Africa — a far greater distance. Enter Onassis, who contracted his supertankers to the companies at exorbitant rates, earning himself many enemies, but also vast wealth.

Industry experts say, however, there are unlikely to be any overnight rags-to-riches stories from the current conflict. They believe the world’s tanker market is already pretty well tied up by established owners, such as Fredriksen’s Front Line and Teekay.

Owners such as Fredriksen were able to make their fortunes by buying tankers at bargain-basement prices, when the industry was in a state of depression.

In the run up to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, for example, some tankers paid for themselves after only a couple of voyages.

But things have been different in the run-up to this conflict. When the market was heavily depressed in the late 1990s, the industry took its own protective measures before it hit the stage where wannabe shipping tycoons could snap up its spoils.

In 1999 tankers were getting rates of only about $10,000-$11,000 a day. That September, the industry responded by scrapping about 24 VLCCs over a period of three months.

The scrappings were significant, representing 10 per cent of the fleet on the spot market and 5 per cent of the world’s total fleet. Fortunately for the remaining tanker owners, the move to strip capacity out of the market coincided with a take-off in the demand for tankers, which meant that there was “a double whammy effect” and rates soared.

Another reason why this particular war may not prove as profitable for tanker owners as the earlier conflicts is because it was so widely predicted. This means that it would not have caught any of the oil companies on the hop.

David Bradley, freight market reporter at the Baltic Exchange, says: “The inevitability of the war allowed a lot of oil companies to take cover.

“They have spent the past few months getting as much oil on to the water as possible.” So why the recent spike? Analysts say that disruptions to supply in Venezuela and Nigeria mean that oil companies have to source their crude from further afield. This has led to increased demand for long-haul vessels, which in turn has led to higher rates.

But while the experts are cautioning against putting the recent spike in tanker rates entirely down to the war in Iraq, they admit that the spot tanker market is much like the stock market. As such, it incorporates a large degree of sentiment.

“If these sentiments move in a ship owner’s favour, because of a war for instance, they can lead to very rapid increases in tanker rates — and vice versa,” Stopford says.

Whether or not the tanker owners earn as much from this war as they have from others remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: they are making money now and a lot of it.

As Stopford says: "The tanker business has spent a long time in the doghouse, but once it gets going, there are few businesses that can generate so much cash so quickly.”

THE WORLD'S TOP TANKER OWNERS

Company  Fredriksen Group No of tankers 80 Average age (yrs) 7.3                         Average size (in deadweight) 243,541

Company  Mitsui OSK Lines No of tankers 77 Average age (yrs) 7.6 Average size (in deadweight) 146,926

Company  Teekay Shipping  No of tankers 89 Average age (yrs) 11.8 Average size (in deadweight) 101,329

Company  Nippon Yusen Kaisha  No of tankers 36 Average age (yrs) 6.2 Average size (in deadweight) 234,391

Company  World-Wide Shipping  No of tankers 30 Average age (yrs) 9.3 Average size (in deadweight) 238,787

Source: Clarksons Tanker Register 2003

Mar. 29, 2003. 01:00 AM <a href=www.thestar.com>STEVEN THEOBALD BUSINESS REPORTER

While U.S. troops are laying siege to Baghdad, investors are prepared to sit it out as they finally understand the invasion of Iraq will be neither clean nor quick.

"No one knows how this is going to resolve itself and no one is going to take any bets," Brendan Caldwell, chief executive of Caldwell Securities Ltd., said yesterday. "Until we have some major breakthrough to the upside in the Iraq war, this market is not going to do anything terribly convincing."

Low trade volumes are amplifying swings in stock prices, Caldwell said.

"The market is drifting lower. It is not moving lower with any conviction."

The war-is-on euphoria sent markets soaring last week, taking New York's benchmark Dow Jones industrial average up 8.4 per cent, its best week in more than two decades.

Then came grisly images and reports showing the Iraqi military wasn't eager to surrender.

As optimism for a fast resolution evaporated, financial markets sank, sending benchmark American indexes to their biggest weekly declines since January.

The Dow was off 55.68 points yesterday to end the week down 4.4 per cent at 8,145.77. The broader S&P 500 dropped 3.6 per cent for the week, falling 5.02 points yesterday to close at 863.50. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index slipped 3.7 per cent on the week to 1,369.60, losing 14.65 yesterday.

Most of the week's losses came in the opening hours of trading Monday.

Toronto's benchmark S&P/TSX index fared somewhat better, gaining 26.04 yesterday to finish at 6,379.48, a 2.4 per cent drop for the week, its fourth losing week in five.

Canada's dollar benefited from a sell-off of U.S. dollars.

The loonie gained 1.01 of a cent (U.S.) over the week, closing yesterday at 67.93 cents.

Crude oil prices, which were up sharply earlier in the week, have stabilized. Traders aren't as concerned about Iraq now that the United States has secured control of key oil fields, ensuring a steady supply.

"I wouldn't say indifference, I'd say there is studied standbackishness," said Brian Prokop, and analyst with Peters & Co., a Calgary-based oil and gas investment dealer.

Crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up 12 per cent on the week, closed yesterday at $30.16, down 21 cents.

In London, Brent crude, up 8.9 on the week, closed yesterday at $27.32, down 47 cents.

At this point, crude oil traders are more interested in news out of Venezuela and Nigeria, Prokop said.

Venezuelan production is still 1 million barrels a day below pre-strike levels and civil unrest in Nigeria has taken a further 800,000 barrels a day off the market, he said.

"If you see Nigeria and Venezuela come back up I think you'll see a softening in oil prices."

War uncertainties, combined with job worries and higher energy prices, helped keep U.S. consumer spending on hold in February for the second straight month.

A report yesterday by the commerce department showed consumer spending was flat in January and February, holding at an annual rate of $7.49 trillion.

"Consumers are growing increasingly cautious in their spending and the income to support future spending is weakening," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. "Consumers are pulling back.''

While financial markets are hunkering down for a longer than expected conflict with Iraq, investors are growing increasingly certain the U.S. Federal Reserve will soon intervene to help boost confidence.

Markets are again starting to price in an interest rate cut by the Fed following its May 6 policy meeting, said Steve Saldanha, senior capital markets strategist at TD Securities.

But markets are assigning a 50-50 chance the Bank of Canada will continue hiking its key interest rates when it sets policy on April 15, he added.

Canada's central bank has made it abundantly clear it will be raising rates further to get inflation back under control, Saldanha said.

"Geopolitical concerns alone won't stay the bank's hand."

On the Toronto Stock Exchange yesterday, the advance was fuelled by a nearly 7 per cent jump in the gold sector as the price of bullion surged $2.80 (U.S.) to $331.50 an ounce in New York. Barrick Gold rose $1.31 (Canadian) to $22.71.

The TSX financial sector was down slightly a day after the House of Commons finance committee report on bank mergers did little to clarify the issue. Bank of Montreal was off 46 cents to $40.50.

Other active Toronto stocks included Bombardier, down 21 cents to $2.71. The company announced yesterday it is cutting 350 non-union jobs from nine transport division sites in North America.

Air Canada lost 14 cents to $2.50, Hudson's Bay was up 35 cents to $8.24 and Ivanhoe Mines rose 19 cents to $3.30.

Shares in Gauntlet Energy were down $1.43 to $1.55 after the company said it will probably have to slash its northern oil and gas reserve estimates.

Inco was up $1.25 to $27.60 after it said it is spending nearly $1 billion to redeem convertible preferred shares and debentures.

With files from the star's wire services

<a href=www.sfgate.com>Web Reference MARIANELA JIMENEZ, Associated Press Writer Friday, March 28, 2003
(03-28) 23:29 PST SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) --

Safely in exile, Venezuelan opposition leader Carlos Ortega is urging followers back home to maintain their effort to oust President Hugo Chavez.

At a news conference Friday in Costa Rica, the president of the Venezuelan Labor Confederation denied the criminal charges that forced him to flee his country, where he was one of the leaders of a paralyzing 61-day general strike.

"I have nothing to fear. I'm not corrupt, nor am I a delinquent," Ortega said. "The most corrupt person our country has given birth to is Chavez, and he will pay with prison for that."

Ortega, charged with treason in Venezuela for his role in the strike, arrived late Thursday in Costa Rica, where he was granted asylum.

He urged his followers to "stay united, no matter what personal or political differences ... so that we can soon leave behind the nightmare we are living."

Costa Rican officials gave Ortega diplomatic asylum after the labor leader expressed fears for his life. Chavez's government allowed him to leave the country on Wednesday.

The general strike disrupted the Venezuelan economy and oil industry, costing an estimated $6 billion in losses without achieving its objective of ousting the president.

Facing rebellion and treason charges, Ortega slipped into the Costa Rican Embassy on March 14 and requested political asylum. "I think I'm more useful to my family and country alive," he said.