UNITED NATIONS, Feb 3 (AFP) - The United Nations was readying on Thursday for a tough report into the scandal-plagued oil-for-food programme in Iraq, which has found "conclusive" evidence against the UN official who ran it.
Paul Volcker, heading an independent enquiry into the programme, declined to comment at UN headquarters before a press conference later in New York to release his initial report.
But writing in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Volcker said his committee had uncovered a tainted operation that did not follow UN procedures for fairness and accountability.
He said that there was a "clear lapse from disciplined judgement" in managing the funds of the 64-billion-dollar programme.
"Perhaps not surprisingly, political considerations intruded, but in a manner that was neither transparent nor accountable," Volcker wrote.
Volcker, the former head of the US federal reserve banking system, was tapped by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to investigate allegations of mismanagement, fraud and corruption in the now-defunct programme.
Oil-for-food, the biggest aid scheme in UN history, was set up to help Iraqis cope with the sanctions slapped on Baghdad over its invasion of Kuwait that sparked the 1991 Gulf War.
Under UN supervision from 1996 to 2003, Baghdad was allowed to sell oil and use the revenues to purchase humanitarian supplies. Saddam's regime was allowed to decide who could make purchases in the programme.
But Volcker said Benon Sevan, Annan's hand-picked choice to run the programme, had entangled himself in an "irreconcilable conflict of interest" by steering some of the contracts to buy Baghdad's oil.
He said the evidence Sevan had done so was "conclusive." Sevan has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Separate questions about Annan's son Kojo, who worked for a Swiss firm that was contracted under the programme, will be addressed in a later report and not in the interim presentation Volcker was to make later on Thursday.
Annan has admitted that the taint of scandal surrounding the programme, which led some US lawmakers to call for his resignation, has cast a cloud over the United Nations.
He has since unveiled plans for a shake-up of senior management and named a new chief-of-staff who will be tasked in part with helping stem the negative media coverage of the United Nations over the scandal.
The chief-of-staff, Mark Malloch Brown, was scheduled to speak to the press later on Thursday after Volcker's own presentation.
"Obviously there will be some harsh judgements on some of the things that we have done in this organisation," Annan said about the Volcker panel on Wednesday.
02/03/2005 17:16 GMT - AFP