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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (662902)	11/27/2004 11:30:54 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

Oil-for-food firm paid Annans son longer than admitted 11/27/2004 12:00:00 PM GMT "Neither he nor I had anything to do with the contracts for Cotecna," Annan said last April The UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said on Friday that Kojo Annan, the son of Secretary-General Kofi Annan received payments from a firm with a UN Iraqi oil-for-food contract about four years longer than the world body previously admitted. Eckhard said that Kojo Annan's lawyer told the panel probing alleged oil for food program corruption about the payments. "There is nothing illegal in this," Eckhard said referring to the payments from the Swiss firm Cotecna. However, it was an embarrassing situation for the United Nations to admit that its earlier information was wrong. Kojo Annan had earlier been named as a former employee of the Swiss corporation Cotecna until 1998, and it was known that he stopped receiving payments at the end of 1999. It wasn’t mentioned before that he was on the payroll until February 2003, just after the scandal surfaced. Eckhard said that Kojo Annan's attorney told him that the younger Annan "continued to receive monthly payments beyond the end of 1999, when we previously thought they had ceased, through February 2004." "The lawyer confirmed that indeed it was so," Eckhard said. "He explained that it was part of an open-ended, no-compete contract between Cotecna and Kojo, and said that they had made this information known to the Volcker commission, so it's in the hands of the Volcker commission," he said, referring to former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who head the inquiry. "This runs counter to what we had told you because it had been our information that those noncompete contract payments had ceased at the end of 1999." "I can't explain it," the spokesman said. "All I can say is it'll have to be now for Paul Volcker to explain it, and clearly the information is in his hands." The oil-for-food program was launched in December 1996. In the program's seven years, Iraq exported $65 billion of oil and $46 billion of that revenue went to the oil-for-food program. The government of the toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's determined which goods it would buy, who would provide them and who could buy Iraqi oil. Cotecna, the firm for which Kojo Annan worked, was chosen to ensure that the goods that were purchased did reach Iraq. Allegations of corruption in oil-for-food program emerged last January in the Iraqi newspaper Al-Mada. The allegations questioned the UN's credibility and caused what Annan described as "a very serious" crisis. Al Mada mentioned names of 270 former government officials, activists, journalists and UN officials from more than 46 countries charged of profiting from oil-for-food program; set to help the Iraqi people under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Currently a wide-ranging investigation by a three-member panel headed by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, is studying those allegations. Eckhard noted that UN officials "who gave Cotecna the contract had no idea that Kojo Annan worked for Cotecna, and that continues to be our belief." Annan said earlier that his son started working for Cotecna at the age of 22 as a trainee in Geneva before Annan became the UN secretary-general. "Neither he nor I had anything to do with the contracts for Cotecna," Annan said last April. "That was done in strict accordance with U.N. rules and financial regulations, and these are also part of the issues that the (Volcker) panel ... will look into."