Oil-for-Food Facts

Oil-for-food: Far from a failure - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

Having spent some time flying across the Atlantic reading the Volcker Report on the Oil-for-Food program and the alleged scandals around it, as well as discussing it with some of the key UN people in New York, I can not but recommend reading the linked article from today's IHT.

The Volcker Report notes - although this has been largely ignored by the media - that the money that the Saddam regime got to an overwhelming degree was the result of smuggling beyond the UN programme, and that this smuggling was known to and in major cases even sanctioned by the US and UK, which were the key members of the 661 Committee of the Security Council.

You can not avoid the conclusion that what the massive Volcker Report investigation has found does not amount to much. In one case, Mr Savan clearly violated UN ethics rule, bu whether anything illegal was done remains to be clarified.

It is worth nothing, that the Volcker Report fails to mention the very large amount of Oil-for-Food money that was transferred to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and for which there has been no accounting whatsover.