Two senior investigators examining the Iraqi oil-for-food programme have resigned, complaining that their findings on the United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan were toned down.
The resignations left the UN-appointed inquiry into the conduct of the $64 billion (£35 billion) programme in disarray. Not only did it reveal serious dissent within the independent inquiry, but it will also fuel angry criticism from Washington over the conduct of the investigation, led by the former United States Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.
Nile Gardiner, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a critic of the UN, said yesterday: "If Mr Volcker's own top investigator no longer has confidence in the handling of the inquiry, then the Volcker commission no longer has an ounce of credibility."
One of Mr Volcker's fellow commissioners, Mark Pieth, a Swiss criminologist, acknowledged that two American members of staff had departed.
Mr Pieth agreed that they had been frustrated. "You follow a trail and you want to see people pick it up," he said of the two investigators. Mr Pieth explained that while last month's report on the dealings of Mr Annan and his son Kojo "told the story" that investigators had unearthed, the three man committee had "made different conclusions than they [the investigators] would have".
The investigators had not been censored, he said. The two had become "personally very involved" in the investigation. The two staff members were understood to be Robert Paton, a lawyer and former Federal Bureau of Investigation officer, and Miranda Duncan, a member of the Rockefeller family. Mr Paton was the senior investigative counsel in charge of the inquiry into allegations of impropriety against the two Annans. Ms Duncan worked on his team.
The report on the Annans was released last month. It found that Mr Annan had failed to ensure a rigorous inquiry after it emerged that his son was continuing to be paid by a firm called Cotecna, which had a multi-million pound UN contract to monitor oil-for-food shipments. It catalogued the longstanding relationship between a senior Cotecna employee, Michael Wilson, and the Annans and said that Mr Annan had asked Mr Wilson to get his son a job.
It also revealed that Mr Annan had lunch with his son and a French-Lebanese businessman called Pierre Mouselli. The younger Mr Annan and Mr Mouselli had earlier met a senior Iraqi diplomat in the hope of securing work connected to the oil-for-food programme, the report related.
The report also said that Kojo Annan had "intentionally deceived" his father, found that he was "not forthcoming" to the inquiry on secret payments from Cotecna, that he had "failed to cooperate fully" with the inquiry and that he has "refused to answer questions" about records he "belatedly" made available.
Kojo Annan was also found to have "actively participated in efforts by Cotecna to conceal the true nature of its continuing relationship with him". Within hours of the report being released, Kofi Annan said its findings amounted to an exoneration. But Mr Pieth and another commissioner, Justice Richard Goldstone, said that they did not.
Thanks to the Telegraph.
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