UNITED NATIONS – The final Volcker report failed to determine whether the current top anti-terrorism official at the United Nations, Javier Ruperez, received oil allocations from Saddam Hussein’s government – an allegation that first surfaced in the Spanish press. Saddam used such allocations to reward perceived political friends, the Volcker report said.

Mr. Ruperez, named executive director of the U.N. Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate by Secretary-General Annan in May 2004, has denied that he ever received any oil allocations. His name, as spelled in Spanish, did not appear on lists found in Iraq after the fall of Saddam’s regime. The names that were on the lists were first published by the Iraqi newspaper al-Mada shortly after the ouster of the Baath regime.

But transliterated into Arabic, Mr. Ruperez’s name is almost identical to “Javier Robert.” Identified as an official of the Spanish People’s Party, “Javier Robert” received allocations of almost 10 million barrels of oil, according to last month’s report by the Independent Inquiry Committee headed by Paul Volcker.

Asked whether Mr. Annan – who was reeling under oil-for-food allegations at the time he nominated the Spanish diplomat to his current post – thoroughly vetted Mr. Ruperez, a U.N. spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, said his nomination was approved by the 15-member U.N. Security Council. She also said Mr. Ruperez completed a financial disclosure form, which is mandatory for U.N. officials at his rank of assistant secretary-general.

The October 27 Independent Inquiry Committee document, which listed companies and individuals at the center of the oil-for-food scandal, based some of its findings on records found in Iraqi offices after the first Gulf war. Among those records were lists of individuals, political entities, and commercial businesses from all over the world that have received oil allocations as favors from Saddam.

The name “Javier Robert” attracted attention in Spain. According to the Volcker report, he received 9,900,000 oil barrels in six separate allocations, through companies based in Switzerland, Spain, Lichtenstein, and France. On three occasions, the notes made by Iraq’s State Oil Marketing Organization bureaucrats say the allocations were made on behalf of the Spanish People’s Party. Knowing no “Javier Robert” among top party officials, some in the Spanish press speculated that the reference might be to Mr. Ruperez, who had served in various top party positions, and who visited Baghdad in the late 1990s.

“I have never been involved in any dealings of oil,” Mr. Ruperez told The New York Sun this week. “I never got any dime from food for oil.”

Before it lost the 2004 election, Spain’s People’s Party, led by Prime Minister Aznar, was a staunch supporter of the Bush administration’s drive to oust Saddam. Mr. Ruperez was Spain’s ambassador to Washington before his U.N. nomination. Mr. Ruperez said he knew of no one named “Robert” among party members, and that at any rate “I doubt very much” that any member of the party has received any oil allocations from Saddam.

Mr. Ruperez noted that his brother, Ignacio, was Spain’s representative in Iraq during the 1990s and is currently the ambassador there. His nephew also visited Iraq, he said, and both received identity cards that never referred to them by anything other than their Spanish names.

Mr. Ruperez added that he himself visited Baghdad for “a couple of days in 1997 or 1998,” as the head of the Fundacion Humanismo y Democracia, an organization that promoted relations with Arab countries, including Saddam’s Iraq. He denied press allegations that the foundation was involved with Riyadh Aziz, who is a son of a former Iraqi deputy president, Tariq Aziz.

The State Oil Marketing Organization lists have proven reliable in the past, but as of yet the identity of “Javier Robert” has not been established. “We didn’t frankly spend a lot of time on it,” the executive director of the Volcker committee, Reid Morden, told the Sun. The committee has not been able to establish the identities or veracity of the Iraqi listings of many other names on the voucher-recipients list, he said. “The name popped up and then it was plugged in.”

“In transliteration from Arabic to Roman transcript there is a lot of variance,” he said.

According to Nimrod Raphaeli of the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute, the Arabic alphabet does not contain the consonant “p,” which is represented by “b” instead. The vowels “o” and “u” are a single sound in the language, and therefore in the case of “Ruperez” and “Robert” the only letters that would com across differently are the final, similar-sounding “z” and “t.”

Mr. Raphaeli, who first translated of the al-Mada list to English from Arabic, told the Sun, “This translation is a translation of a translation. It is not an exact science.” Mr. Raphaeli said that the People’s Party affiliation made him think that the “Robert” mentioned on the list was Mr. Ruperez, but added that it would be hard to prove conclusively.

“The name is not mine,” Mr. Ruperez told the Sun. He noted that he had sued two Spanish publications that have pointed to the similarity in the name. In court settlements reached with the Spanish publications, La Clave and Interviu seen by the Sun, both sides agreed that that the name similarity does not establish Mr. Ruperez as the “Robert” mentioned in the al-Mada list.

Separately, American ambassador John Bolton asked Mr. Annan in a letter to keep the Volcker committee’s records and direct it to “preserve the integrity of the files and the ability of states to access them” for possible further investigations in America and elsewhere. The Independent Inquiry Committee said in a statement yesterday that it “will remain operational until the end of December 2005 to assist duly authorized law,” and will work with the United Nations on a future arrangement for the records’ preservation.