France Arrests Ex-Ambassador in Probe of U.N.
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

UNITED NATIONS – A former aide to Secretary-General Annan who previously served as France’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jean-Bernard Merimee, was captured yesterday in Paris as part of a French investigation into the oil-for-food program.
Mr. Merimee, 68, is expected to testify today in front of Judge Philippe Courroye. The judge is France’s leading investigator into the bribes and other illegal gains under the United Nations-run program that was set up to let Iraq sell oil to pay for food for its citizens who were suffering under sanctions imposed by the United Nations on the government of Saddam Hussein.
Last year’s report by the CIA’s Iraqi Survey Group, which detailed oil-for-food improprieties as part of its ultimate verdict on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, cited Mr. Merimee as one of those targeted for bribery by Saddam.
Mr. Merimee was also one of the international public figures whose names appeared on a long list published by the Iraqi newspaper al-Mada shortly after the 2003 war. Drawing on what it said were official Iraqi documents, the newspaper alleged that the diplomats, politicians, and press personalities on the list, known for their sympathy for Saddam, were also on his payroll as part of the oil-for-food-related bribery scheme.
“As far as I know, he is not accused of anything he has done while he was here,” a diplomat at the French mission to the United Nations told The New York Sun. Mr. Merimee served as the French ambassador in Turtle Bay between 1991 and 1995. The diplomat, who said that he was not authorized by the Foreign Ministry to be quoted by name, added that the oil-for-food program was not officially launched until 1996.
Between 1999 and 2002, Mr. Merimee worked as an adviser to Mr. Annan, helping to negotiate transfers of funds between the United Nations and the European Commission. But the United Nations, too, said that if Mr. Merimee had done anything wrong, it was not while serving Mr. Annan. “His work here had nothing to do with the Iraq program,” Mr. Annan’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, told the Sun.
The numerous oil-for-food investigations, including by the U.N.-authorized committee headed by Paul Volcker, established that the years between the end of the first Iraq war, in 1991, and the authorization of the program by the Security Council, in 1996, were crucial for the formation of the many inadequacies that allowed the large-scale bribery, which reached its peak between 2000 and the second Iraq war in 2003.
Mr. Merimee was one of several French officials suspected of benefiting illegally from the program. Among those reportedly investigated by Judge Courroye is a former interior minister, Charles Pasqua, and others at the top of the French political establishment close to President Chirac, who was leading the anti-war camp in Europe.
French businessman Patrick Maugein, who has known Mr. Chirac since childhood, was also close to Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz. An investigation led by Senator Coleman, a Republican of Minnesota, cited Mr. Maugein as a figure identified by Iraqi agents who thought he could influence Mr. Chirac. Mr. Maugein’s name was linked to an oil trading company involved in the scandal, the Dutch-based Trafigura Beheer BV.
According to a September article in the Financial Times and Italy’s Il Sole 24 Ore, Trafigura deposited $247,500 into a bank account controlled by Mr. Annan’s son, Kojo. A spokesman for Mr. Volcker, Michael Holtzman, said yesterday that the team’s final report, which will address the role of some 3,000 companies that profited from oil for food, is expected at the end of the month.