Iraq oil-for-food papers available until year end

By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The U.N.-established panel that
investigated the Iraq oil-for-food program will stay open until
the end of the year to allow prosecutors access to its
documents, the United Nations said on Friday.

Investigators and prosecutors from 28 countries have
already requested documents from the Independent Inquiry
Committee since it released its final report on October 27,
said Michael Holtzman, spokesman for the IIC, whose Manhattan
office has been reduced to a skeletal staff.

The IIC had been scheduled to close at the end of this
month.

The panel, headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman
Paul Volcker, was commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan to examine charges of corruption in the defunct $64
billion program, the largest ever handled by the world body.

“The office’s exclusive function is to work with national
law enforcement authorities of member states seeking to follow
up on the findings of the final IIC report,” U.N. spokesman
Stephane Dujarric said.

“Obviously for national law enforcement authorities it is
much easier at this point for them to continue dealing with the
IIC as they are the ones who collected all the documents and
they are the ones who have the historical knowledge of the
investigation,” Dujarric said.

Officials, companies or politicians from some 40 countries
were implicated in the scandal.

The oil-for-food operation began in December 1996 and ended
in 2003. It was designed to ease the impact on ordinary Iraqis
of U.N. sanctions, imposed in mid-1990s after Baghdad’s troops
invaded Kuwait.

The U.N. program, supervised by the U.N. Security Council,
allowed Saddam Hussein to sell oil in exchange for a large
variety of goods. But Volcker’s inquiry showed he bilked the
program by $1.8 billion and then earned another estimated $8
billion by selling oil outside the program.

Saddam either demanded kickbacks from companies doing
business in Iraq or paid politicians, groups and government
officials to lobby against the pervasive sanctions.

Some 15 people have been charged in the United States.
France, Switzerland, Australia, India and others have also
started investigations but there has been little news from
Russia, where many of the firms and officials named are based.

Dujarric said the United Nations was “very much encouraged”
by the Iraqi authorities to extend the mandate of the IIC.”