Oil Report to Say Aide to Annan Shed Files
By Warren Hoge and Judith Miller 
March 29, 2005
The New York Times
Original Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/national/29oil.html


UNITED NATIONS, March 28 - Iqbal Riza, the former head of Secretary General Kofi Annan's staff, will be criticized Tuesday in a report of the commission investigating the oil-for-food program for having thrown away documents on the program, according to a person who has seen the report and a former United Nations diplomat.
The former diplomat, John G. Ruggie, assistant secretary general for strategic planning from 1997 to 2001, asked to confirm the report about Mr. Riza, said the missing papers covered the period from January 1997 to the end of 1998. Mr. Ruggie said that Mr. Riza had told him that he had been questioned about the episode by investigators from the commission, which is headed by Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman. That coincides with the early stages of the oil-for-food program and the hiring of a major contractor in the program that employed Mr. Annan's son.
The report is also expected to criticize both Mr. Annan and his son, Kojo Annan, for Kojo's involvement with one of the major contractors in the oil-for-food program, under which Iraq was allowed to sell oil to buy aid goods during the period of international sanctions against the country. The panel is expected fault Kojo Annan for accepting nearly $400,000 from Cotecna Inspections S.A., a Swiss-based company. 
In an interview late Monday, Mr. Riza, 70, denied wrongdoing. He resigned as Mr. Annan's chief of staff on Dec. 22, to be replaced on Jan. 3 by Mark Malloch Brown. He said he had ordered the destruction of his personal copies of documents to save filing space three months before Mr. Annan ordered his staff to preserve all material on the program. These were not records, since they were copies of what was in the archives or in the filing registries of various departments, Mr. Riza said, adding, I don't know why I'm being criticized.
He said he told the Volcker panel in December that he had authorized the destruction of the copies, called chron files, because his secretaries had complained that they were running out of filing space. He said that he assumed that copies of all the records were kept elsewhere and that the files were mostly copies of outgoing, not incoming, documents. But they are very voluminous, and they are periodically destroyed not only by us, but at the State Department and everywhere, he said.
Mr. Annan issued his order to preserve oil-for-food documents in June 2004. Mr. Riza said he ordered the file destruction in April without telling Mr. Annan, because it was so routine, but learned Monday that the actual shredding of documents actually took place after Mr. Annan's order. He said he doubted that his secretaries ever even saw the order because the circular was issued only to the professional staff.
Mr. Riza said he had virtually no contact with the oil-for food program except an exchange of memos in January 1999. That was with Joseph Connors, who was then under secretary general for administration and management, and the memos were about whether to investigate whether Cotecna had been awarded the oil-for-food contract fairly. He said the request was prompted by an article in the British news media suggesting that Cotecna's employment of Kojo Annan had helped it win the contract.
He said that Mr. Connors had explored the issue and found that Cotecna had won the contract legitimately. He said that while the Volcker panel complained that it had been unable to find the exchange of memos about Kojo Annan and Cotecna, he was told that the investigators eventually found the documents they needed.
Kojo Annan and Cotecna have denied any wrongdoing and have said he did not work on matters related to the oil-for-food program. 
The Volcker commission is also expected to cite Dileep Nair, the head of the United Nations' watchdog unit, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, for using oil-for-food funds to hire a staff person in his office who ended up not working on the investigation.
According to United Nations employee documents, the person was Tay Keong Tan, like Mr. Nair from Singapore. Mr. Nair proposed him for a higher ranking job than he was found suitable for, but in both cases the position was supposed to be related to the oil-for-food program and ended up not being for that purpose.
In what appeared to be a pre-emptive move, Mr. Nair late Monday circulated a statement saying that he had been exonerated in an earlier investigation in November.
Warren Hoge reported from the United Nations for this article, and Judith Miller from Jerusalem.