Security Council welcomes oil-for-food probe
UNITED NATIONS (CNN) -- The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution Wednesday welcoming an independent panel that will investigate allegations of corruption in the Iraq oil-for-food program.
In a meeting that took just two minutes, the council passed resolution 1538, which emphasizes the "importance of full cooperation with the independent high-level inquiry by all United Nations officials and personnel, the Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq, and all other Member States."
"Obviously, these are serious allegations, which we take seriously," Secretary-General Kofi Annan told reporters when he arrived at U.N. Headquarters. "And this is why we've put together a very serious group to investigate it."
Paul Volcker, the former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman who will lead the investigation, said he expected cooperation from all the countries involved and said the panel's report would be "as complete as we can make it."
"I didn't agree to do this lightly, but I think there are very important accusations made about the U.N., accusations about the administration of the program, accusations about activities outside the U.N., which need to be resolved," Volcker said at a press briefing at U.N. Headquarters.
In addition to Volcker, the panel will include Justice Richard Goldstone, former head of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a former chief war crimes prosecutor for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and Mark Pieth, a Swiss law professor who is an expert in the issue of money laundering.
The panel will have access to all U.N. records and personnel and "is authorized to obtain records and interviews from persons unaffiliated with the U.N. who may have knowledge relevant to the inquiry, including allegations of impropriety."
 |  Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was tapped to lead the investigation. |
The oil-for-food program was established to ease the humanitarian toll of sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Its first oil exports were in December 1996 and its first food imports in March 1997.
Before the program officially closed down in November 2003, it brought some $38 billion in humanitarian supplies into the country, according to figures released by the U.N.
Allegations of corruption haunted the program from its inception, but the controversy gained momentum with the discovery of Iraqi documents alleging U.N. officials and others profited from the oil sales.
In March, an official from the General Accounting Office told a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives that Saddam Hussein personally made $10.1 billion between 1997 and 2002, $4.4 billion on oil sold through the program and the rest through smuggling.
