Who is this clown?

Smoking Gun
EXCLUSIVE by NICK BUTTERLY
March 17, 2005
Daily Telegraph

SENIOR Liberal senator Ross Lightfoot smuggled $25,000 into Iraq on behalf of Australia's biggest oil company and armed himself with high-powered pistols for protection.

Senator Lightfoot told The Daily Telegraph yesterday he used a taxpayer-funded "study'' tour to secretly spirit the money ($US20,000 in cash) into Iraq in January on behalf of Woodside Petroleum.
The money, sewn into the lining of a suit jacket, was given as a "donation'' to the Kurdish Regional Government. In an intriguing twist, Senator Lightfoot sold his Woodside shares on Tuesday, just before details of his Iraq tour revealed.
His admissions will deeply embarrass the Howard Government and raise the prospect that Senator Lightfoot could have broken the law by smuggling cash - improper conduct that would make his future as an MP untenable.
Smuggling cash of more than $10,000 outside Australia can attract a jail term up to two years and a maximum $13,000 fine.
The Government is also likely to face a parliamentary grilling today over the implications of a Coalition MP on a taxpayer-funded trip acting as an operative for a private company in which he held shares when he could have benefited from the trip by gaining access to business contracts in Iraq.
It was not clear last night whether Senator Lightfoot took the money out of Australia or if it was arranged for him or an associate to collect upon arrival overseas.
There are strict federal laws governing taking large sums of cash out of Australia.
Any amount over $10,000, or the foreign currency equivalent, must be declared and offenders can face up to two years in jail or a maximum fine of $13,000.
The renegade West Australian senator and acting Deputy President of the Senate went to Iraq to observe the recent elections. He stayed in the town of Sulaymaniyah in Kurdistan, a northern province of Iraq, where Woodside is trying to tap into Iraq's vast 115 billion barrel oil reserves.
"I was offered and accepted the use of a .38 pistol," he wrote in his official report to Parliament.
Photographs also show the outspoken Senator brandishing a Russian made AK-47 assault rifle alongside Iraqi Kurd troops.
Mr Lightfoot said the wad of US greenbacks was to be donated to a run-down hospital in Halabjah in Iraq's oil-rich north.
When first spoken to by The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday he said the cash was sewn into the lining of his own jacket.
But yesterday he said it had been carried by an offsider on his behalf.
The senator said he handed the money to the Prime Minister of the Kurdish Regional Government, Omar Fatah.
Neither the cash nor the hospital are mentioned in Senator Lightfoot's report to Parliament.
The study tour was sanctioned by Parliament on the understanding he was there to observe Iraq's first democratic election, on January 30, this year.
It was also to look at "mutually beneficial" business opportunities.
"It was never suggested it [the $US20,000] was going to be tied into the acquisition of oil leases," Senator Lightfoot said yesterday.
"It was carried by another person with me and given to the Kurdistan Regional Government."
Senator Lightfoot said smuggling the cash was necessary because there were no other reliable means of getting money into the country.
"There's no post offices . . . no mail, no banks," he said.
Last November, Woodside signed a deal to explore for oil in Kurdistan. Under the deal the company will also train Iraqi oil workers in Australia.
Senator Lightfoot flew from Perth to Istanbul and then on to eastern Turkey before crossing snowbound mountain passes in dodgy taxis to deliver the booty.
Senator Lightfoot said the Woodside donation was brokered by Professor Robert Amin, a former Kurdish exile who now chairs the Woodside Hydrocarbon Research Facility at Curtin Univeristy in WA.
That is where Iraqi Kurds will study under the Woodside deal.
The senator said he never took part in any talks between the oil companies and Kurdish authorities.

The Australian Labor Party would not mind so long as he was donating $25,000 to their pin up boys namely the " insurgents" I can imagine the fun they will have with this with their mates in the Left wing media here .