An inconvenient form of payment

There's a news story making the rounds in the local media about a local congressman's trip to Iraq supposedly being financed by Saddam Hussein. Ignoring all the non-essential fluff and diving straight to the heart of the story, here's the bit that I find the most intriguing:

"The indictment says Al-Hanooti received 2 million barrels of Iraq's oil as payment for his services"

Now, how exactly would one turn that sort of payment into cash ? It's not like you can just call up Exxon and say "Hey, I have 2 million barrels of oil, you interested ?" and not get asked a lot of potentially awkward questions [at least I assume you can't ...]. And I suspect that an offer to sell 2 million barrels of oil on Ebay, that fine disintermediating marketplace, would also lead to some scrutiny and headscratching.

Maybe this is the equivalent of being paid in Ningis, from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"The Ningi [is] a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side. It is valued at the rate of eight Ningis to one Triganic Pu, but thanks to the Ningi's immense size (almost twice as wide as the Earth's equatorial radius), it is more-or-less impossible to collect enough to own one pu."

I hope somebody does a follow-up story on how/whether Al-Hanooti spent his payment.