Too many hands in the till in UN's $5bn kickback scandal

The Senate foreign relations committee, however, not wanting to be upstaged by its House counterpart, called publicity hearings to blow off steam. Chairman Dick Lugar asked if some countries turned a blind eye to the rampant theft of aid that should have gone to hungry Iraqis because they "saw a money-making opportunity".

Senator Joe Biden chimed in, demanding that our ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, release the names of the US companies the State Department has known for years have been part of the kickback scheme. But Negroponte, soon to be the US’s man in Baghdad working with the UN, said no such list had been compiled.

Meanwhile, because the son of the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, was on the payroll of the Swiss company hired to monitor the imports, and because Kofi’s right-hand man had been in charge of the programme rife with 10 per cent kickbacks, the world’s foremost diplomat announced he would appoint an independent panel to investigate. He chose men of integrity: Paul Volcker, former US Federal Reserve Bank chairman; Richard Goldstone, the first Balkans war-crimes prosecutor; and Mark Pieth, a Swiss lawyer said to be an expert on money-laundering.

End of cover-up, right? Wrong. Volcker required a Security Council resolution, which would presumably empower his panel to take sworn testimony and gain access to the UN’s corrupt contracts that enabled Saddam Hussein to build palaces instead of providing food to his people. But such a UN resolution would reveal dealings with companies in Russia, France and China - all Security Council permanent members whose nationals had their hands in the till.

To nobody’s surprise, Vladimir Putin’s government was the first to say no. Russia’s UN spokesman said: "We understand the reputation of the secretariat is in question, but we do not think it is possible to adopt a resolution on the basis of mass media reports."

Of the 270 suspected kickbackers and recipients of illegal allocations of oil whose names were revealed by al-Mada, the Iraqi newspaper, a quarter were Russian, including a member of the Russian parliament. No wonder Putin wanted no "regime change", and resists any serious investigation.

And what of those "mass media reports" about the scope of the corruption, which are backed by the initial findings of the US Congress’s general accounting office? Reporters have passed along some details of what the GAO estimates is a $5 billion fraud (not counting $5 billion more in smuggled oil). The Financial Times, working with Italy’s Sole, recently advanced the story, interviewing a middleman to show how an apologist for Saddam got $400,000 to finance a film.

But outrage that drives coverage is selective, and there is little establishment appetite to pursue this complex scandal. Speaking power to truth, Newsweek headlines "Anti-UN campaign", and reports dark suspicions by UN bureaucrats that the scandal was "drummed up" by the doves’ Iraqi villain, Ahmad Chalabi. And France’s US ambassador writes under "Oil-for-food lies" in the Los Angeles Times that "unfounded accusations ... have been spread by a handful of influential, conservative TV and newspaper journalists in the US". He noted that all 15 members of the Security Council approved all the oil-for-food contracts.

This scandal has no friends.

• William Safire writes for the New York Times