A DOTING aunt in Cyprus yesterday became the focus of the United Nations investigation into the Oil-for-Food scandal after the head of the United Nations programme claimed that she had given him large sums of cash.

Benon Sevan, former head of the largest humanitarian programme in UN history, claimed that he had received $160,000 (£85,000) in cash from Berdjouchi Zeytountsian, his spinster aunt, who died last year after falling into a lift shaft.

A UN inquiry, led by Paul Volcker, the former head of the US Federal Reserve, has cast doubt on Mr Sevan’s explanation and questioned this “unexplained wealth”.

In its initial findings, the Volcker panel accused Mr Sevan of secretly receiving millions of barrels of oil allocations from Saddam Hussein’s Government in an Iraqi attempt to buy influence at the UN.

The inquiry has not shown that Mr Sevan, who denies that he received “a penny”, received any money for transferring his oil allocations to a trading company run by a cousin of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former UN Secretary-General.

The panel said that it was continuing to investigate four cash payments of $50,000, $45,000, $30,000 and $35,000 that Mr Sevan claims he received from his aunt during her visits to New York in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2003.

According to a relative, Mr Sevan was the illegitimate son of one of Ms Zeytountsian’s three sisters. The woman, Verginia, was shunned by the family, Mr Sevan’s father is understood to have refused to recognise him and Ms Zeytountsian took over his care.

He was schooled at the respected Melkonian Institute in Cyprus before going on to Columbia University in New York. Mr Sevan remained close to Ms Zeytountsian. “She used to visit him in New York every year for two or three months and was planning to visit him again before her death,” a neighbour in Nicosia said.

Until her retirement, Ms Zeytountsian worked for more than 30 years in the darkroom of the photographic department of the Public Information Office in Nicosia, where she is remembered with great affection as a “very friendly, very nice lady”.

She died last June at the age of 84, three months after she was admitted to hospital with serious injuries after an accidental fall a few feet into the lift-shaft in her block of flats.

“She had a modest lifestyle, from what I could tell,” the neighbour said. “This block, which was built 35 years ago, is for people with average incomes, not rich people.”

According to the UN inquiry, Ms Zeytountsian lived on a monthly pension of 319.88 Cyprus pounds (£275) and government national insurance payments of Cyp£215.17 a month.

Her two-bedroom flat was bought for her by Mr Sevan and her only other apparent source of savings was a Cyp£37,399 certificate of deposit that she held jointly with her nephew until April 2004.

The inquiry said: “According to a family friend, Ms Zeytountsian had never shown signs of having access to large amounts of cash and would not have been expected to carry large amounts of cash outside the country.”

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