Is Kofi Annan A Crook?

Claudia Rosett notes the Oil-for-Food web may yet snare something juicy:

But one of the most intriguing episodes in Park's alleged Iraq-related ventures, as recounted in a Sept. 7, 2005 report from the Volcker committee, involves a Jordanian bank check for $988,885, allegedly bankrolled by Saddam's regime, made out to "Mr. M. Strong," and delivered in August of 1997 by Park to Maurice Strong.

When Strong endorsed this check, back in 1997, he was serving as a top aide to the newly promoted Secretary-General Kofi Annan, coordinating U.N. reform. Strong had just finished a stint in 1996 similarly advising Boutros-Ghali on reform issues. Asked last year by Volcker's team to explain this payment, Strong first denied any memory of the check. Then, when Volcker's investigators showed him his own signature on the cancelled check, he denied any knowledge of where the funds originally came from. Strong said he had done nothing wrong and that the check was meant solely to cover an investment Park wished to make in one of Strong's family-controlled companies, Canadian-based Cordex Petroleum Inc.

Volcker poked about in this story, noting that Park lost his investment when Cordex went bankrupt in 1998. Volcker also documented a number of meetings in New York during the formative years of Oil-for-Food, 1996 and 1997, between Strong and high-ranking Iraqi officials. These get-togethers included a meeting at the Iraq mission in April 1997, in which, by Strong's own account to the Volcker committee, Saddam's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, tried to enlist Strong's sympathies, and invited him to visit Iraq.

Strong turned down the invitation, however. And in a series of statements last year he denied both directly and through his lawyers that he ever had anything to do with Oil-for-Food. On April 18, 2005, he declared: "I cannot recall a single instance in which I had any contact or discussion on the program with any of the officials responsible."

In a letter included in the Sept. 7 Volcker report, Strong's lawyers wrote: "Mr. Strong has stated and hereby declares to your committee that he was not involved, that he did not seek to be involved or influence the Programme." In that same report, Volcker concluded: "While there is evidence that Iraqi officials tried to establish a relationship with Mr. Strong, the Committee has found no evidence that Mr. Strong was involved in Iraqi affairs or matters relating to the Programme or took any action at the request of Iraqi officials."

Maurice Strong may be entirely innocent, and nothing here is meant to suggest otherwise. But in the interest of accuracy, perhaps Paul Volcker, with his dozens of investigators and $35 million budget, should have looked more closely at the U.N.'s own public records. These show that according to Secretary General Kofi Annan himself, Strong was the chief coordinator of Annan's 1997 U.N. "reform" that among other things created the U.N.'s "Office of the Iraq Programme" — set up specifically to take over the management of Oil-for-Food.

How long before incriminating papers show up in the Senate with Hillary's pawprints all over them?