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Investigator: U.N. scandal exposes corruption
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-28 20:02
Switzerland said Thursday it has launched a criminal investigation focusing
on four people connected to the oil-for-food program. They were not identified.
And Texas oilman Oscar S. Wyatt Jr, the former chairman of Coastal Corp. who
was described in the report as a favorite customer of Iraq, pleaded not guilty
Thursday in New York to charges that he conspired to pay several million dollars
in illegal kickbacks to Saddam's regime to win oil-for-food contracts. Volcker
said Wyatt, 81, was the lone exception to an Iraqi ban on selling oil to
American companies.
The program achieved "an important measure of success" in providing food,
medicine and other humanitarian items to Iraqis, and in keeping weapons of mass
destruction out of Saddam's hands, Volcker said.
"But that success came with a high cost and in my judgment, a really
intolerable cost by grievously wounding the confidence and the competence and
even the integrity of the United Nations."
The United States said the investigation again showed the need for urgent
reform of the United Nations.
"I do think it does highlight that there are certain management practices
within the U.N. that need reform," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack
said.
The 623-page report documented in minute detail Saddam's
manipulation of the $64 billion oil-for-food operation. The program, which ran
from 1996-2003, allowed Iraq to sell limited and then unlimited quantities of
oil provided most of the money went to buy humanitarian goods such as food and
medicine. It was meant to alleviate the suffering of ordinary Iraqis caused by
U.N. sanctions imposed after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
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