Volcker Findings 'Flawed,' Filing Says
BY BENNY AVNI - Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 17, 2005

UNITED NATIONS - Accusing a U.N. investigative team of leaking crucial testimony to Secretary-General Annan before publishing a report that allowed him to declare himself exonerated, a top investigator who has resigned from the team, Robert Parton, added new doubts about the credibility of its findings.
Calling the findings of the team headed by Paul Volcker flawed and accusing the team of being soft on Mr. Annan, the new disclosures by its former top investigator, Mr. Parton, confirmed an April 29 report in The New York Sun.
Mr. Parton filed the allegations in a Washington federal court a day before that court handed a small victory to the Volcker committee in its battle against the former investigator and against Congress. U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled yesterday that the Volcker team should be allowed to review material Mr. Parton gave to the House Committee on International Relations, which is headed by Rep. Henry Hyde, a Republican of Illinois.
Lawyers for the Volcker panel argued that, when Mr. Parton handed over documents in his possession to the Hyde committee, he had violated a confidentiality agreement he had signed when he joined the Volcker team.
In a declaration handed to court Sunday night, Mr. Parton said that, ironically, it was the panel, known as the Independent Inquiry Committee, which has violated a crucial confidentiality agreement - with a witness.
Without my knowledge or that of the witness, and in violation of the confidentiality agreement, members of the committee provided the name of the witness - and the substance of his statement - to the secretary general and his counsel during the investigation, Mr. Parton said in the court paper, which he wrote under the penalty of perjury.
The witness in question is Pierre Mouselli, a former business associate of Mr. Annan's son Kojo who, prior to agreeing to cooperate with the Volcker committee, had received a vow of confidentiality signed by the panel's executive director, Reid Morden. In the February 16 letter, obtained by the Sun yesterday, Mr. Morden promises to take all reasonable steps in its investigation to protect your identity from disclosure outside the committee.
A spokesman for the IIC, Michael Holtzman, said that due to legal strategy, the committee would withhold any statement until a later date.
Mr. Mouselli's attorney, Adrian Gonzalez, told the Sun yesterday that on March 24, his client received a strange call on his mobile phone from Kojo Annan. The phone number was unpublished, and Mr. Mouselli had obtained it long after the termination of his ties with Kojo Annan. Mr. Mouselli was surprised by the call because the number was known only to a few people, Mr. Gonzalez said, among them the Volcker investigators.
The younger Mr. Annan wanted to know what Mr. Mouselli had told the investigators about his father's lunch meeting with the two of them in Durban, South Africa, in September 1998.In that crucial meeting, Mr. Mouselli maintained, the secretary-general had been made aware of his son's intention to conduct business in Iraq in the future.
The call was particularly unusual, Mr. Gonzalez said, because - as the Volcker report noted later - the younger Mr. Annan had declined to deal with the committee beyond one interview he granted. He still refuses to cooperate with the investigation.
The March 29 IIC report found no reasonably sufficient evidence to conclude that Mr. Annan had known about his son's intention to do business in Iraq. Just days before the report came out, Mr. Annan's lawyer, Gregory Craig, had phoned Mr. Gonzalez and reviewed the testimony Mr. Mouselli had given to the committee.
The result of that phone call was that Mr. Gonzalez wrote a clarification about the lunch meeting, which was cited in the IIC report as evidence that Mr. Mouselli's testimony on that event was inconsistent and therefore not credible.
The Associated Press reported on Sunday that in the material Mr. Parton gave to the House committee, there is evidence that Mr. Annan's testimony to the IIC was itself contradictory. This included lapses of memory on several key meetings with his son and Mr. Mouselli, and with his son and the head of Cotecna, Eli Massey. Mr. Annan said he had not known that Cotecna intended to bid on an oil-for-food contract prior to December 1998,when the Swiss inspection company that had employed his son won the U.N. contract. Mr. Craig explained to the AP that Mr. Annan had trouble remembering six-year-old events.
Yet, according to Mr. Gonzalez, the discrediting of his client's testimony occurred as a result of a demand by Mr. Craig that Mr. Mouselli provide precise details from a 1998 lunch with Mr. Annan and his son.