Half of Oil-for-Food Companies Paid Bribes, Kickbacks
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
UNITED NATIONS – More than half of the companies that traded with Iraq in the pre-war oil-for-food program paid bribes and kickbacks to the government of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, according to the final report of a U.N.-appointed panel investigating corruption in the $64 billion operation.
A former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, chairman of the Independent Inquiry Committee, said the companies made nearly $2 billion in illegal payments. He was to outline his findings in his fifth and final report on Thursday.
The committee will publish the names of about 3,000 companies suspected of paying an illegal surcharge or abusing the program, according to senior investigators. The inclusion of the companies in the report does not amount to evidence of a crime, but does represent a comprehensive account of the companies for which U.N. investigators discovered “some evidence of manipulation one way or another,” said one senior investigator.
Thursday’s report will mark the end of a 18-month $30 million investigation that has uncovered widespread corruption and mismanagement in the U.N.’s largest humanitarian aid program.
