Oil for Food Forces Indian Reshuffle
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 – India’s ruling Congress Party announced yesterday a major government reshuffling after to allegations by the Volcker committee investigating the U.N. oil-for-food scandal that Foreign Minister Natwar Singh received oil allocations from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Mr. Singh quit his post yesterday, but remained a member of the government.
The restructuring, under which Mr. Singh may reassume his position as minister if found not guilty by Indian investigators, was denounced immediately by the right-of-center Bharatiya Janata Party. BJP leaders demanded that the foreign minister be fired outright. Congress Party leaders reportedly asked the United Nations for documents related to the Volcker findings, as did the BJP’s former prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, according to the Indian press.
A U.N. spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, told The New York Sun yesterday that no such requests have arrived yet at the United Nations.
Indian press attacked the Volcker findings on Mr. Singh and other Indian politicians and companies.The U.N. undersecretary-general for public information, Shashi Tharoor, who is currently in India, told the Mumbai Mirror in an interview published yesterday that Secretary-General Annan has accepted the Volcker reports on the United Nations, but merely “took note” of the fifth and final report, which dealt with companies and individuals outside the organization.
“What should be done with those findings is now left entirely to individual governments,” Mr. Tharoor said. “The report has not found anyone guilty of anything.” Ms. Okabe added that the Volcker findings now “enable the U.N. and national authorities to further investigate.”
Saddam’s favorite form of bribery was allocating oil to politicians and companies, which could then “lift” them for a profit. In India, according to last month’s report, Natwar Singh received allocations that totaled 4 million oil barrels. The Congress Party was allocated 4 million barrels. A leader of Jammu and Kashmir Panther’s Party, Bhim Singh, received 7.3 million barrels, and the Reliance Petroleum Company 19 million barrels, according to the report.
