THE FBI is closing in on two senior officials at the UN as prosecutors vow to “wring the towel dry” in their investigation of the Oil-for-Food corruption scandal.

The two unnamed “high-ranking officials” were allegedly offered bribes by a North Korean-born businessman, previously linked to South Korean intelligence, working secretly for Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.

The investigation by the FBI’s white-collar crime and counter-intelligence units represents a challenge to the UN’s credibility and legitimacy and could jeopardise its survival.

A senior Western diplomat said yesterday that the scandal meant that Kofi Annan was “not wholly safe” as UN Secretary-General, a job he holds until the end of next year.

Tongsun Park, 70, who was at the centre of the “Koreagate” bribery scandal in Washington in the 1970s, was charged in New York last week with acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Iraq.

Mr Park, a colourful figure once dubbed The Oriental Gatsby, told South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper that he was in hiding in Tokyo and was considering a plea bargain to testify against high-ranking UN officials. He admitted that he had received “a little” money from Iraq, but said: “I was told the target of US attorneys’ investigation was corruption charges against high-ranking UN officials related to the Oil-for-Food programme, not me.”

Prosecutors allege that Mr Park and Samir Vincent, an Iraqi-American businessman, worked secretly on Iraq’s behalf to obtain favourable terms in the creation of the Oil-for-Food system in the mid-1990s, arranging payoffs for two UN officials.

Mr Vincent, who is co-operating with authorities under a plea agreement, acted as a go-between to a former American official while Mr Park “served as the intermediary” to UN officials, court papers say.

Mr Park allegedly received at least $2 million in cash from Iraq, brought into the United States in Iraq’s diplomatic pouch. Iraq also agreed to pay $5 million into a bank account in London and $10 million into a Channel Islands account.

Mr Park allegedly met “UN official No 1” twice at the official’s residence in Manhattan and once in Geneva in 1993, and “UN official No 2” at a restaurant in Manhattan in about 1996. According to court papers, he told witnesses that he had used a $5 million guarantee from Iraq to “fund business dealings with UN official No 2” and had invested $1 million in a Canadian company set up by the official’s son in 1997 or 1998.

Neither of the suspect UN officials has been identified by prosecutors. But the charges have focused attention on Mr Park’s connections at the UN. Mr Park was seen at UN headquarters on several occasions, and at one point senior UN officials pushed to get him a job as head of the UN Information Centre in Tokyo, according to sources.

Joseph Verner Reed, an adviser to Mr Annan, said: “He was a friend — I assume still is a friend — of former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali.”

The allegations have raised questions about a trip in June 1993 that Dr Boutros Ghali made to Geneva to meet Tariq Aziz, then the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister. The UN is refusing to release a list of officials who accompanied him. On Monday, Maurice Strong, a Canadian tycoon and UN adviser sometimes known as “Mr UN”, said that he had a legitimate business relationship with Mr Park and that he would co- operate with investigators.

“In 1997, Mr Park invested on a normal commercial basis in an energy company with which I was associated that had no relationship with Iraq,” Mr Strong said. “I have continued to maintain a relationship with Mr Park.”

He said that he had “no involvement or connection whatsoever with the UN’s Iraqi Oil-for-Food programme or any other of its Iraqi activities”.

UN officials said that at the time the investment was made Mr Strong served as an adviser on UN reform and had an office near Mr Annan’s on the 38th floor of the UN’s headquarters. Mr Strong agreed yesterday to “step aside” temporarily from his current post as the UN envoy to North Korea.

He also once served on the board of a company called Air Harbour Technologies with Mr Annan’s son, Kojo, who is also under investigation in the Oil-for-Food scandal.

After Mr Strong resigned from that post, Kojo Annan was reportedly joined on the board by Michael Wilson, a childhood friend who knows Kofi Annan as “uncle”.

Mr Wilson, whose father was the Ghanaian Ambassador to Switzerland, worked for Cotecna, the Swiss company that employed Kojo Annan and won a UN border- inspection contract in Iraq.

Mr Wilson is under investigation in an unrelated case involving suspected payoffs at the World Intellectual Property Organisation in Geneva.

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