Last week Paul Volcker said he would investigate one famous nonemployee of the United Nations, Kojo Annan, who happens to be the secretary general’s son.

This is a tempting direction in the Oil-for-Food inquiry. But Mr. Volcker might do better if instead of poking around Mr. Annan’s family connections he reaches further back, into the less explored Boutros-Ghali clan.

The former Fed chairman and his team of investigators are sitting on top of thousands of boxes filled with U.N. documents, some of which detail ties to firms devised by operators who know how to daisy-chain companies in a way that would make true ownership all but undetectable.

It will be some time, then, before Mr. Volcker produces any bombshell to credibly refute or confirm what he called “a lot of smoke”: allegations that already turned the U.N. into a metaphor epitomizing institutional corruption.

Presenting his first quarterly report, Mr. Volcker told reporters his priority target is the U.N. and its officials. However, since Kojo Annan’s employer, the Geneva-based shipping inspection company Cotecna, was a contractor with the U.N., it would also have to be investigated.

As Cotecna noted in a statement quoted by the New York Times’ Judith Miller last week, the younger Annan worked mostly in Nigeria and Ghana, not in Iraq. Sure, the 1999 U.N. ditching of the British-based Lloyd’s shipping inspectors and their replacement with Cotecna’s smelled to the high heavens. But Mr. Volcker’s team might want to walk the cat back to an earlier phase of the program.

When the idea for a humanitarian plan to ease suffering in sanction-burdened Iraq was hatched at the U.N., in 1996, the then-secretary general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was losing favor with the Clinton administration. He found himself embroiled in a titanic internal struggle, which eventually was won by the Washington-backed Kofi Annan.

In the camps that were formed among the top brass, one staunch ally of Mr. Boutros-Ghali’s was a longtime U.N. bureaucrat named Benon Sevan.

As an insider speculated once in a casual conversation, that alliance might have been based on tribal kinship. Mr. Boutros-Ghali is an Egyptian Copt – an ancient, close-knit Christian sect that has learned how to squirrel away its acorns for those bad periods when the Muslim majority around it turns nasty. Mr. Sevan, an Armenian Cypriot, belongs to a similarly persecuted Mediterranean minority.

Mr. Sevan, the insider told me, was not sure then about his future in the Annan administration. Rather than being pushed out, however, his new assignment was to run the recently-born oil-for-food program, which at the time looked like a dead-end job. In a few years, of course, this program would turn into the most ambitious enterprise in the history of the U.N. and Mr. Sevan would oversee more than $10 billion annually, almost 10 times the budget of the U.N. itself.

Mr. Sevan is now the most famous among U.N. officials who is accused of taking Saddam’s bribes. If the allegations are true – Mr. Sevan denies any wrongdoing – greasing the pockets of the man running oil-for-food was one great way for the Iraqi dictator to assure that all shenanigans in the program were overlooked.

Back in March, the Wall Street Journal’s Therese Raphael described how millions of barrels of Iraqi oil were allegedly allocated in the name of Mr. Sevan to a Panamanian-based trading company, Africa Middle East Petroleum.

That company, according to the Journal, is owned and managed by a Geneva-based oil trader named Fakhry Abdelnour, a Copt and close relative of Mr. Boutros-Ghali.

And in one more interesting detail, Cotecna, that same company that employs Mr. Annan’s son, was also founded by a Copt, Elie Georges Massey.

All these ties may never lead to Mr. Boutros-Ghali, but they are intriguing nevertheless. Did anybody on the secretary-general’s team that devised the program, in the name of humanitarian necessity, realize even back in the mid-1990s that it might assume such gigantic proportions, with billions of loose dollars waiting for exploitation?

Mr. Volcker said last week that at first he would look into how the program was “formulated and administered within the U.N.” oil-for-food officially began during Mr. Annan’s tenure, but its roots are in the Boutros-Ghali era. If investigators want to start at the beginning, they might as well look there.