Oil-for-food committee reviews new Annan memos

The committee probing the UN oil-for-food programme has announced it will again investigate Secretary-General Kofi Annan after two previously unknown emails suggested he may have known more than he claimed about a multi-million-dollar UN contract awarded to the company that employed his son.

One email described an encounter between Annan and officials from the Swiss company Cotecna Inspections in late 1998 in which its bid for the contract was raised.

A second from the same Cotecna executive expressed his confidence that the company would get the bid because of “effective but quiet lobbying” in New York diplomatic circles.

If accurate, the new details could cast doubt on a major finding the UN-backed Independent Inquiry Committee made in March: that there was not enough evidence to show that Annan knew about efforts by Cotecna, which employed his son Kojo, to win the Iraq oil-for-food contract.

Through his spokesman, Annan said he did not remember the late 1998 meeting. He has repeatedly insisted he did not know Cotecna was pursuing a contract with the oil-for-food programme.

In a statement, the Independent Inquiry Committee said it was “urgently reviewing” the two emails, which Cotecna discovered recently and turned over on Monday night.

“Does this raise a question? Sure,” said Reid Morden, executive director of the probe.

The oil-for-food programme was established in 1996 to help ordinary Iraqis suffering under UN sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It allowed Iraq to sell oil, provided most of the proceeds were used to buy humanitarian goods.

It has since become the target of several corruption investigations in the US and abroad.

Annan appointed the Independent Inquiry Committee, led by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, in an effort to settle the issue for good.

A key issue then was whether Annan was guilty of a conflict of interest because the United Nations awarded the $10m (€8.3m) a year contract to Cotecna while Kojo Annan was a consultant for the company.

In an interim report in March, Volcker’s committee accused Cotecna and Kojo Annan of trying to conceal their relationship after the firm won the contract.

It said Kofi Annan did not properly investigate possible conflicts of interest but cleared him of trying to influence the contract or violating UN rules.

The new emails will be another distraction for the UN secretary-general, who had claimed he was exonerated by that report. He had hoped that the committee was finished investigating his personal involvement.

Morden said investigators with the probe had planned to interview Annan soon as part of its investigation into management of oil-for-food. “This certainly adds another topic,” he said of the Cotecna emails.

In a statement, Cotecna again denied wrongdoing in getting the contract to certify deals for supplies Iraq imported under oil-for-food.

The first December 4, 1998, email from Michael Wilson, then a vice-president of Cotecna and a friend of both Kofi and Kojo Annan’s, mentions brief discussions with the secretary-general “and his entourage” at a summit in Paris in 1998.

He wrote that Cotecna’s bid was discussed and Cotecna was told it “could count on their support”.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said UN officials reviewed the records of Annan’s Paris trip and found no record of any exchange with Wilson. He said Annan also did not recall talking to Wilson then.

Wilson’s memo also refers to a “KA” who made courtesy calls to various African leaders at the Paris summit. That would appear to be Kojo Annan, then a Cotecna consultant. He was known to have been in Paris at the time.

Eckhard said it would be reasonable to assume that Kofi and Kojo Annan had met in Paris, though he knew of no record of it.

The contents of that email were first reported by The New York Times.

The second email from Wilson, sent minutes after the first, discussed a meeting that took place three days earlier with UN procurement officials to talk about the contract bid.

Under a section labelled “conclusion”, it said: “With the active backing of the Swiss mission in New York and effective but quiet lobbying within the diplomatic circles in New York, we can expect a positive outcome to our efforts.”

Most telling about that email, however, was a brief mention in which Wilson said Annan’s approval of the bid was required. UN rules in fact did not require Annan to approve those decisions, something officials here have repeatedly stressed.

In that light, Wilson’s belief that Annan’s approval was necessary sheds light on his thinking at the time toward the secretary-general. Wilson could not be reached for comment.