Looks like Volker's "Oil for Food" investigation will act as a "gatekeeper" to stop the other investigations from getting to the documents. Why am I not surprised?
Friends of Saddam blog
Volcker Press Conference Post-Mortem
The press is summing up Paul Volcker's press conference yesterday. Let's see what they had to say.
ChinaView, whom I linked earlier as having the developing story, has the ultra-condensed version of Volcker's report.
The three-member investigative team chaired by Paul Volcker said that the allegations of misconduct and maladministration are serious, and that they have decided to set their priority for further investigations on the UN and its various organs.
The AP expands on that, reporting that Volcker's report dealt mainly with the focus of the investigation, and the assumed length of it.
At a news conference releasing the committee's first quarterly report, the former Federal Reserve chairman said he doesn't know how long it will take to complete the investigation, which he estimated will cost at least $30 million over the next year.
The committee's report states that ''the allegations of misconduct and maladministration are serious'' and Volcker told reporters, ''I think clearly there's a lot of smoke.'' He refused to speculate on what the investigation might find.
''If you really wanted to wrap this up, in the sense of chasing down every contractor involved here and what happened to the money, I think we'd be here until the next century,'' he said. ''Obviously, we want to investigate enough of these cases to have an understanding, as best we can, of what happened.''
Volcker says that there is a lot of evidence to sort through. In the U.N. alone, there are 10,000 boxes of documents, and millions of pages of information to examine. One would think such a task would make him more open to the idea of cooperating more with other investigations.
Not so, apparently...
Volcker said there's ''a lot of competition'' in investigating allegations of payoffs, bribes, kickbacks, overcharges and undercharges by companies and individuals who bought Iraqi oil and sold Iraq goods.
...
Volcker's committee has taken custody of the U.N. files and he told reporters it will only give out information to other inquiries that it feels will not prejudice its own investigation or be prejudicial to particular individuals. He said the committee's 50-member staff was already ''well advanced'' in organizing the U.N. documents and has started conducting interviews.
Seems to me that, as long as Volcker is viewing the other investigations as "competition," there won't be a lot of initial "cooperation." Something to watch.
To sum up, Volcker has not indicated anything that can be verified as corruption right now. And it seems that this investigation is in for the long haul, with a $30 million price tag. There will be millions of documents to sort through, and with a proportionately small investigative team, this could take a while before we know the whole truth about the Oil-For-Food program.
Unless, of course, Mr. Volcker decides to be more open and cooperative with other investigations, which at the moment appears unlikely. |
