UN urged to protect oil-for-food evidence

By Hugh Williamson and Mark Turner 
November 14, 2005
Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e7821b20-555b-11da-8a74-00000e25118c.html

Governments seeking to prosecute officials and companies accused of corruption in relation to the Iraq oil-for-food affair could soon lose access to crucial evidence unless the United Nations intervenes to secure further funding, according to one of the authors of the UN report on the matter.
Mark Pieth, a Swiss criminal law professor and member of the independent inquiry into the UN oil programme in Iraq, told the Financial Times documents collated by his team over 18 months were set to revert back to their initial sources on November 30, when the inquiry’s mandate expires.
“This means that prosecutors and others will have to search for paperwork in Iraq, within the UN or elsewhere, which makes further investigations very difficult,” Mr Pieth said.
He called on the UN to intervene to ensure that a part of the inve
stigation s secretariat remained in place for three months to manage access to the documents for prosecutors around the world –  a move he estimated would cost about $1m (¬ 850,000, £570,000).
He estimated that it would cost that much to ensure that a  small
 team” remained in place for three months to manage access to the documents.
The new Iraqi government had been asked to pay this sum, but had not given a clear response.
Feisal al-Istrabadi, deputy Iraqi ambassador to the UN, said the matter was under “expedited review”. He shared the concern that “the findings not be buried”.
“There may be institutional reasons to have copies in New York, but not to the exclusion of the government of Iraq,” he said. “The people of Iraq paid for the Volcker commission. I think it was money well spent in the end, but certainly the [Iraqi government] ought to have continued access and ought to retain, at the very minimum, copies.”
A UN spokesman said discussions were under way between the Volcker commission and the UN on how to handle the documents, but “we don’t have a final dispensation”.
The oil-for-food inquiry, which Mr Pieth said cost $35m, pointed to severe weaknesses in the leadership of the UN, and last month presented evidence that 2,200 companies – including dozens of top multinationals – paid kickbacks to the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein to gain contracts under the oil-for-food programme.
Prosecutors in several European countries have launched investigations into these allegations, and Mr Pieth said the documents cited in the footnotes would in many cases be inaccessible from December onwards if action was not taken.
The anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International
 at the weekend called on Kofi Annan, UN general-secretary, to ensure the documentation remained intact.