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Private Organization |
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Indianapolis company that sold Iraq a 40 million dollar brass recycling plant financed by BNL Atlanta, which its owner told Congress was for commercial products and Iraqi documents assigned to cartridge cases and artillery fuses. | Indianapolis, Indiana | 2026-09-21 | 2026-09-21 |
SerVaas Incorporated is an Indianapolis manufacturing company owned by Beurt SerVaas. In September 1988 it signed a contract with an Iraq state enterprise, Al Shaheed, for a plant to recover brass from spent shell casings. The contract, worth 40 million dollars, was financed by the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, and a further agreement of June 14, 1989, was made with the procurement network of Safa al-Habobi.1
SerVaas told the House Banking Committee on April 9, 1991: "It was explained to us that Iraq was looking to a long-term project of utilizing this substantial amount of scrap for the purpose of supplementing its oil revenues through the sale of commercial products in the peacetime economy." The committee's chairman, Henry B. Gonzalez, read into the record on September 25, 1992, an internal memorandum of July 31, 1988, and documents of Matrix Churchill, showing that the 70/30 brass was to double Iraq's output of the discs from which cartridge cases are drawn and to supply parts for artillery fuses, with commercial sales a residue. SerVaas told the Indianapolis Star on August 8, 1992: "Probably the only thing they are doing is melting the brass down."1
All the equipment had been shipped when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, though the plant was not yet running. Gonzalez said SerVaas afterward renegotiated with al-Habobi and Saalim Naman and sold the contract through a foreign holding company, Izane, so as to escape the president's order freezing Iraqi assets. President George H.W. Bush's report to Congress of September 1991 under the Iraq Sanctions Act of 1990 stated that "United States suppliers did not contribute directly to Iraq's conventional or nonconventional weapons capability."1
Footnotes
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Gonzalez, Henry B. "Brass Factory in Iraq," Congressional Record, House, September 25, 1992, p. H9502; Gonzalez, floor statement of August 10, 1992. ↩︎