NEW YORK (AP) — The United Nations will give oil-for-food investigators informal notes from Security Council meetings about the $64 billion program, having received no objection from the council’s 15 members, a U.N. spokesman said yesterday.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan gave the council until yesterday to voice opposition to his plan to turn over the potentially sensitive documents.
The Independent Inquiry Committee, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, requested the documents as part of its probe into suspected corruption in the program, under which Iraq received food, medicine and humanitarian goods in exchange for oil.
The investigating committee collected thousands of documents from the Secretariat, but wanted the entire file of notes from closed meetings of the committee that monitored sanctions against Iraq and was responsible for overseeing the oil-for-food program, council diplomats said.
Last week, Mr. Annan told council diplomats of his intention to turn over the documents, but they refused to act without instructions from their home governments.
They expressed concern about accuracy, sloppy translations and the inclusion of personal opinions in them. There also was a debate over whether the notes belonged to the Secretariat or to the Security Council.
Those fears were allayed, however, and none of the 15 members blocked the move. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the United Nations would work closely with Mr. Volcker to make sure he gets all the notes.
The oil-for-food program was designed to help ordinary Iraqis suffering under U.N. sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait; but it has become the target of several corruption investigations since the Iraqi leader was ousted.
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