GORDON BROWN has seized almost £100m held by the former Iraqi regime in Britain and sent it to the new government in Baghdad, writes Robert Winnett.

The money is believed to have been raised illegally by Saddam Hussein from the United Nations’ oil for food programme and through breaking sanctions.

The Treasury is a key body in an international effort to identify and repatriate Iraqi assets hidden around the world that are believed to total more than £1 billion. It refused yesterday to reveal where the cash had been found.

America has a team of financial experts working with its troops in Iraq to root out information on the secret hoards. The Americans believe Saddam’s hidden assets are being used to fund insurgency in Iraq.

The effort to find and return Iraqi assets comes as George Galloway, the anti-war independent MP for Glasgow Kelvin, celebrates winning a libel case against The Daily Telegraph. The newspaper claimed that documents found in Baghdad revealed Galloway made £375,000 from the oil for food programme.

In an interview in The Sunday Times today, Galloway says the documents may have been part of an international conspiracy to smear him. Over the next few weeks, he says, he will name prominent people behind this campaign.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s former special representative in Iraq, said: “People produced these bits of paper from the oil ministry. But you’ve got to have evidence that oil actually changed hands rather than bits of paper which don’t mean anything. The Iraqis were perfectly capable of having all our names on file with some nasty bit of paper.”

Oil for food investigators insist the Galloway verdict has no bearing on their work and that documents they are working from have been independently verified. Comprehensive paper trails are backed up by statements from Iraqi civil servants.

Sources claim that although Galloway was not a beneficiary of the programme, one of his close associates did profit. Fawaz Zureikat made sizeable donations to Galloway’s Mariam Appeal. The Jordanian trader also sold oil allocated to him by the regime, but says the allocations never depended on him helping the MP’s charity.

Last week the oil for food probes were focused on the future of Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general. In January Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, is expected to publish an interim report into the scandal that could spark his departure.

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