Spain's Popular party spurred companies to bid

By Leslie Crawford and Javier Blas 
December 2, 2005
Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d33f1ee4-62d8-11da-8dad-0000779e2340.html

Spanish companies bid for the oil-for-food contracts in the late 1990s with the encouragement of the Popular party government in Madrid. José María Aznar, then the prime minister, was making friendly overtures to Saddam Hussein's regime in the hope that Repsol, the Spanish oil company, would be rewarded with big oil exploration contracts when UN sanctions were lifted.
As late as the spring of 2001 Spain, like France, believed that the sanctions regime was drawing to a close. Repsol was particularly interested in the Nasariya oil and gas fields, and negotiation between the Spanish company and Iraqi officials was intense. To please the Iraqis, Mr Aznar reopened Spain's diplomatic mission in Baghdad and sent Miquel Nadal, his deputy foreign minister, and Juan Costa, his top trade minister, on official visits to Iraq.
These were the highest-ranking western officials to visit Baghdad since the sanctions had been imposed. Their trips raised eyebrows in Europe and the US. The Iraqis, for their part, thanked Spain's diplomatic show of support by awarding six oil allocation contracts totalling 10m barrels to a Javier Robert of the Spanish People's party, according to a list of non-contractual beneficiaries included in the Volcker report.
Mr Robert has not been identified by the Spanish government or the Popular party, now in opposition. But leftwing Esquerra Republicana deputies have called for a parliamentary inquiry into whether the Popular party and their allies profited from the oil-for-food programme in Iraq at the expense of thousands of innocent civilian victims. In the same statement, Esquerra Republicana said it believed that the Mr Robert of the Volcker report was in fact Javier Rupérez, a former Popular party parliamentarian and the Spanish ambassador to Washington from to 2004.
But Mr Rupérez, a career diplomat who is now the United Nations' president of the committee against terrorism, has denied that he is the Mr Robert of the UN report. He says he made a number of trips to Baghdad in the late 1990s, when his brother, Ignacio Rupérez, was the chargé d'affaires at the Spanish mission, but he denies being the beneficiary of Iraqi oil allocations. Mr Rupérez successfully sued a Spanish magazine that suggested he was the Spaniard in the Volcker report.
The questions in parliament concerning the mysterious Mr Robert have been the only fallout from the oil-for-food scandal in Spain. The Spanish foreign ministry said it had not conducted any internal investigation to establish the true identity of Mr Robert. The attorney-general's office, which would be responsible for pressing charges against the Spanish companies that violated the UN sanctions regime, has not yet read the Volcker report. A spokesman said the report was still being translated into Spanish.
The lack of interest may be partly because by mid-2001 Spanish policy towards Iraq was generally regarded to have been a failure. Spain was neither big enough nor influential enough to sway international opinion in favour of Mr Hussein's regime. Iraq decided to direct its favours to the permanent members of the UN Security Council, with particular attention paid to France, China and Russia. Repsol's negotiations on the Nasariya oil fields collapsed after the company declined to pay possibly illicit commissions in the form of export pre-financing arrangements and donations to the oil-for-food programme.