Oil Probe Chief: Document-Sharing at U.N. Discretion

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The New York Sun

UNITED NATIONS – The head of the team charged by the United Nations with investigating the oil-for-food program told congressional investigators that sharing documentation with them would be limited, and that the U.N. team would decide how much it wants to release.


Answering a congressional letter sent last week to Secretary-General Annan, Paul Volcker, the man charged by the U.N. with investigating allegations into wrongdoing in the Iraq program, said that the U.N. does not make “internal confidential information” available to its member states. Any request for documentation, he added, “needs to be considered in that light.” Nevertheless, Mr. Volcker said in the letter he sent yesterday to two American senators that he hoped his guidelines for release of documentation will be “a basis for satisfying in a reasonable and cooperative spirit the requirements of the Senate.”


His letter came in response to a request by senators Norm Coleman, a Republican of Minnesota, and Carl Levin, a Democrat of Michigan, which was made in a November 9 letter to Mr. Annan.


The two heads of the Senate’s Permanent Committee on Investigation complained that Mr. Volcker’s team is “affirmatively preventing” the release of documentation related to their own investigation into oil-for-food, one of several such probes on Capitol Hill.


Among the latest findings: Saddam Hussein diverted money skimmed from the program, designed to compensate his people under U.N. sanctions, into payments to Palestinian Arab suicide bombers. The Associated Press cites congressional investigators who say they uncovered evidence that oil-for-food funds were diverted to secret Jordanian bank accounts and from there to families in the West Bank and Gaza. Each family of suicide bombers in Israel received $25,000 as a reward.


The addressee of the letter, Mr. Annan, declined to answer, referring the senators to Mr. Volcker instead. “Annan turned over all oil-for-food documentation to Volcker,” U.N. spokesman, Fred Eckhard, told The New York Sun yesterday. Since Mr. Volcker now controls all related documents, he was the one answering the senators’ letter, he added.


Mr. Volcker wrote yesterday that after the middle of next year, when his team completes “a definitive report” on the U.N.’s management of the program, “we fully anticipate” that “substantially all” relevant documents will be released. This, he added, would provide “a basis for congressional and public review of our conclusions.”


But for now, he wrote, his team needs to keep a delicate balance between “essential and desirable transparency and disclosure” and a “degree of confidentiality and simple fairness.”


He therefore politely declined to guarantee the release of documentation specifically requested by the senators, which relates to the British-based shipping inspection company that was a U.N. contractor, Lloyd’s Register. According Mr. Volcker, those documents are related to “a sensitive area involving allegations of bribery, and undue influence.”


Lloyd’s Register was replaced by the U.N. in February 1999 by a competing Swiss-based shipping inspection company, Cotecna, which had business relations with Mr. Annan’s son, Kojo. The United Nations strongly denied allegations that the secretary-general’s son used his famous name to secure the contract for Cotecna.


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