Volcker Keeps Oil-for- Food Probe Office Open 
By Reuters
December 22, 2005
The New York Times
Original Source: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-un-probe-iraq.html

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. independent inquiry into the scandal-ridden oil-for-food program in Iraq will keep its doors open until March 31 so that prosecutors from individual nations can pursue wrongdoers, the United Nations announced on Thursday.
After that the documents collected during an 18-month investigation by the Independent Inquiry Committee, led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, will be turned over to the United Nations.
Mark Malloch Brown, chief of staff to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, agreed in a letter to a request by Volcker to keep the committee's office open to assist ``duly authorized law enforcement and regulatory agencies in cases they may be pursuing against companies, individuals and entities.''
Volcker, in his last report on October 27, accused more than 2,200 companies in 66 countries of diverting some $1.8 billion to the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's government under the $64 billion program. Some nations have started investigations of individuals, groups and companies but many have ignored the bribes and kickbacks.
The Volcker committee will not continue its own probe but maintain the documents only to help prosecutors around the world follow up on the findings, Malloch Brown said.
He said the committee would disband on December 31 as scheduled and be renamed the Office of the Independent Inquiry Committee.
Canadian Reid Mordan, executive director of the committee, will head the office. The three commissioners -- Volcker, South African Judge Richard Goldstone and Swiss law professor Mark Pieth -- can be called on to give advice as needed.
Iraq, through its U.N. ambassador, Samir Sumaidaie, agreed to continue funding the Volcker office, which has spent some $35 million out of Baghdad's oil sales collected under the program.
The extension of the mandate from January 1 to March 31 would cost $1.25 million, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. Iraq has allowed the United Nations to finance the inquiry in the belief that prosecutions would help it recover some of the funds Saddam distributed as bribes.
``Anything that we are able legally and morally to share with a prosecutor or authority of any country, we will be more than willing to do that,'' Goldstone told Reuters in an earlier interview.
The archive contains documents beyond the committee's five published reports. Some restrictions would be placed on information the committee acquired under confidentiality agreements or that could endanger confidential informants.
If prosecutors sought confidential information from the committee, they would be referred to the original source, Goldstone said.
The oil-for-food humanitarian program, which began in 1996 and ended in 2003, was designed to ease the impact on ordinary Iraqis of U.N. sanctions, imposed when Baghdad's troops invaded Kuwait in 1990. Iraq was allowed to sell oil in order to buy food, medicine and many other goods.