Kremlin Ex-Aide Disputes Iraq-Oil Allegations
By ALAN CULLISON and YOCHI J. DREAZEN 
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 19, 2005; Page A12
MOSCOW -- Disputing American accusations that Saddam Hussein effectively bought Moscow's opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a former top Kremlin official said he received no money from the much-maligned United Nations oil-for-food program and suggested the U.S. Congress is mounting a politically motivated attack on the Russian government.
The comments by Alexander Voloshin, a onetime senior aide to Russian Presidents Vladimir Putin and Boris Yeltsin, amount to the most detailed Russian response yet to a U.S. Senate report this week that accused top Russian officials of accepting lucrative oil allocations from Mr. Hussein in return for Moscow's support on the U.N. Security Council. The counterattack threatened to escalate the tensions between Moscow and Washington over the oil-for-food program, which from 1996 to 2003 let Iraq use oil revenue to buy food and other humanitarian goods despite a global embargo.
Mr. Voloshin also became the second foreign official in as many days to challenge the methodology and fairness of the Senate panel probing the U.N. program, complaining that congressional investigators failed to contact him before issuing a report that he said contained numerous factual errors and misperceptions.
Just because someone was against the war in Iraq doesn't mean he was taking bribes, Mr. Voloshin said at a meeting with Western journalists here. I never had any kind of dealings, direct or indirect, with Iraqi oil quotas.
Andy Brehm, a spokesman for Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said the panel gave an advance copy of the report on Mr. Voloshin to the Russian Embassy last week in the hope it would be forwarded to him. He said the panel didn't contact Mr. Voloshin directly because the report was based solely on documents, and documents speak for themselves.
If Mr. Voloshin has evidence beyond mere words that shows the subcommittee's report to be false, we would love to see it, but so far he has presented nothing, Mr. Brehm added.
Mr. Voloshin, who quit his Kremlin job in 2003, said he was aware that Russian private and government-connected companies traded in Iraqi oil under the U.N. program, but stressed that he didn't take part in any of the dealings. Senate reports this week said lucrative allocations went to ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky and, through Mr. Voloshin, a collection of top Kremlin aides called the Russian Presidential Council. The Senate said Mr. Voloshin was allocated three million barrels of Iraqi oil.
Mr. Voloshin suggested that some Russians lobbying for lucrative oil allocations in Baghdad might have overstated or lied about their importance to the Iraqis, who thought they were giving oil allocations to influential people when they weren't. Mr. Zhirinovsky also has denied receiving money from Iraq or from companies that purchased Iraqi oil.