UNITED NATIONS – A French bank hand-picked by Saddam Hussein for the oil-for-food program is not fully cooperating with the United Nations investigation into allegations of corruption, the head of the investigation said yesterday.

A source involved in the probe told The New York Sun that the independent team, headed by a former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, is specifically looking into letters of credit to the French-based BNP Paribas bank, which handled the bulk of the transactions of Iraqi oil sales and goods purchased through the U.N.-supervised program.

BNP has been “cooperative up to a point,” Mr. Volcker said yesterday at a news conference convened for the release of the full list of companies that bought oil from Iraq in exchange for humanitarian goods under the oil-for-food program. The bank was only one of several avenues of investigation that include allegations against the U.N. official who ran the program, Benon Sevan, and appearances of impropriety regarding a contract with Cotecna, a shipping inspection company connected with Secretary-General Annan’s son, Kojo.

“We’re only now getting close to the bone,” Mr. Volcker said, adding that investigators encountered a “little resistance,” with targets of the investigations.

“They’re clients of the U.N. and we are entitled to have information relative to that account,” he said in reference to the oil-for-food’s BNP escrow account. “I think we’re going to get it, but it hasn’t been volunteered quite as rapidly as we might have wished.”

The bank was a major player in the scheme devised in the mid-1990s to compensate for the humanitarian suffered resulting from sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1990 Gulf War.

Oil-for-food ran from December 1996 to November 2003. Shortly after its demise, allegations that it was a hotbed of bribes and kickbacks to businessmen, government officials, and companies around the world, as well as Saddam’s own coffers, appeared.

The program, according to numbers released yesterday, consisted of $64.2 billion in oil contracts and $32.9 billion in humanitarian goods. Oil sales, the proceeds from which were primarily held in a BNP escrow account, were done through 248 international companies, including four major American oil firms. Some 3,545 companies sold humanitarian goods to Saddam’s regime.

Mr. Volcker stressed that “being on the list implies nothing about corruption.” Most business in the oil-for-food program was done through letters of credit issued to BNP by Iraq’s central bank. Congressional investigators are looking into questions of whether BNP complied with American laws to assure bankers know who their clients are.

“We are fully cooperating with all inquiries,” BNP spokeswoman Edwina Frawley told the Sun. But Mr. Volcker was not the only one disagreeing.

Compared to the “forthcoming” Swiss-based Cotecna, which was responsible for inspecting goods coming into Iraq, and the Dutch-based Saybolt, which oversaw the oil sales, BNP cooperation has not gone “beyond what was expected of it,” a Congressional source who asked not to be named told the Sun.

Lisa Miller, spokeswoman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told the Associated Press yesterday that its chairman, Rep. Joe Barton, a Republican of Texas, will send a letter Friday to President Chirac asking for “his country’s full cooperation with the committee’s oil-for-food investigation.”

Mr. Volcker said he recently met with French officials but that the questions of BNP’s cooperation have not come up.

Mr. Volcker also said yesterday that he ran into “a little trouble in Baghdad,” with the American accounting firm Ernst & Young, hired by the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit to review Saddam’s over 20,000 files related to oil for food.

Mr. Volcker was repeatedly asked by reporters about impropriety issues resulting from the fact that he was placed in his post by Mr. Annan, and that his investigation was financed by leftover funds from the oil-for-food program.

Perhaps to fend off these questions, he said that a recent Wall Street Journal revelation that Kojo Annan’s “employment connections” with Cotecna, had not been terminated even after the company was hired by the U.N. was “a result of our investigation.”

Kofi Annan “is not in charge of the investigation,” Mr. Volcker insisted.

The secretary-general yesterday showed signs of frustration with the allegations. “There is no doubt that the constant campaign has, and the discussions have, hurt the U.N,” he said.

Mr. Volcker said that he would start wrapping up the investigation and issue a final report “after the turn of the year,” and that between now and then he might issue one or two interim reports.