June 15, 2005
Memo Raises Questions on Annan Role in UN Contract
By REUTERS 
Filed at 7:34 a.m. ET
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A newly disclosed memo appeared to cast doubt on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's insistence he was unaware of a bid by a Swiss firm that employed his son for a lucrative contract under the scandal-tainted U.N. oil-for-food program.
U.N.-appointed investigators were ``urgently reviewing'' the memo, Michael Holtzman, a spokesman for the Independent Inquiry Committee led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, said on Tuesday.
The memo described a late-November 1998 Paris meeting of Annan with officials of Cotecna Inspection Services, just weeks before the Geneva-based company won the contract.
The contract has become a focus of Annan's critics, including several U.S. Republican lawmakers who have accused him of mismanagement and called for his resignation.
Chief U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said Annan had no recollection of any such meeting during the trip to Paris, for a summit of French-speaking world leaders.
Annan's son, Kojo Annan, was a Cotecna consultant at the time of the encounter described in the memo, but it was unclear whether Kojo was present at the encounter. The document was written by Michael Wilson, a family friend of the Annans who was at the time a senior Cotecna executive.
The one-page Dec. 4, 1998, e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, was addressed to top Cotecna executives and devoted just two sentences to the U.N. contract matter.
It stated: ``We had brief discussions with the SG and his entourage. Their collective advise (sic) was that we should respond as best as we could to the Q&A session of the1-12-98 and that we could count on their support.''
The memo was first disclosed by the New York Times. 
ANNAN HAS 'NO RECOLLECTION'
Annan, in Paris on Tuesday, ``has no recollection of any such exchange,'' Eckhard told reporters.
A view that the United Nations would support Cotecna's bid ``could not have come from the secretary-general because he had no knowledge that Cotecna was a contender for that contract,'' the spokesman said.
Cotecna officials later attended a question-and-answer session on the U.N. bidding in New York on Dec. 1, 1998 -- the meeting the memo was apparently referring to. Wilson, in a second memo obtained by Reuters, said the session went well.
``Our chances of getting the contract are very good. We presented a sound technical tender competitively priced. With the active backing of the Swiss Mission in New York and effective but quite (sic) lobbying within the diplomatic circles in New York, we can expect a positive outcome to our efforts,'' Wilson wrote.
The first memo, commenting on an unrelated matter, referred to the presence at the Paris summit of a Cotecna official identified as ``KA,'' but it was unclear whether this was a reference to Kojo Annan.
Cotecna, U.N. officials and Kojo Annan's lawyers could not immediately say whether he had attended the Paris meeting or been in contact with his father at the time.
Cotecna won a multimillion-dollar U.N. contract on Dec. 31, 1998, to certify goods coming into Iraq under the $67-billion oil-for-food program, which ran from late 1996 until 2003.
The program is under investigation by several U.S. congressional committees as well as the Volcker panel.
The program allowed Iraq, then under U.N. sanctions, to export oil and use the proceeds to import humanitarian goods.
A report released by the Volcker committee in late March concluded Annan did not influence the contract award.
Cotecna, which said it uncovered the memo only recently, reiterated in a statement its view that it had won the contract ``fairly and on the basis of price.''