Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve who heads a UN-appointed panel investigating charges of corruption in its oil-for-food program in Iraq, said on Monday that he would need at least US$30 million, a staff of 60 and probably another year to determine whether UN officials took bribes or engaged in other corruption while administering the huge relief program.
Speaking at a news conference near the panel's temporary offices next to the UN, Volcker said his staff of 50, more than half of them American, has already identified and gained access to about 15 million pages of UN records of the program in Baghdad and New York.
The panel has also conducted interviews with witnesses and law enforcement authorities in several countries and is opening offices in Baghdad, New York and Paris.
Conceding that the inquiry has gotten off to a slow start given the security situation in Iraq and would take years to complete, he vowed it would be the "definitive" inquiry into how the program, the UN's largest relief program, was managed, or mismanaged.
"We're only at the start," Volcker said, "and a slow start at that."
He was accompanied by the panel's two other members, Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who served as the first prosecutor on the UN Balkan war crimes tribunal, and Mark Pieth, a Swiss lawyer and expert on bribery and money-laundering.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan established the independent committee under pressure in April in response to allegations that UN officials and diplomats had taken bribes from Saddam Hussein's government while administering or overseeing the program.
A recent report by the Accountability Office, formerly the General Accounting Office, in Washington accused the Iraqi regime of having pocketed more than US$10 billion from the six-year program. Iraq's government used US$64.2 billion in Iraqi oil sales to pay for food, medicine and other goods from 1997 to 2003.
In February, a document from Iraqi ministries reportedly cited Benon Sevan, the chief of the UN office that administered the program, as having received oil allotments himself. Sevan has denied the charges.
A six-page report and 21-page annex released by the Volcker panel on Monday shed little light on the panel's deliberations. But it did attest to Volcker's tenacity in securing a Security Council resolution ordering member states to cooperate with his inquiry and a warning issued on June 1 from Annan to UN staff that efforts to hide, destroy or remove documents relevant to the inquiry "could result in disciplinary action."
Volcker said that his panel had not yet received the original list of oil vouchers supposedly awarded to diplomats and UN officials, which was published by an Iraqi newspaper several months ago. Nor had he determined how his panel would vet such documents to see if they were forgeries.
So far, he said, his panel has US$4 million for the inquiry, but he said Annan has promised him whatever he needs.
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