The former director of the United Nations oil-for-food scheme for Iraq received bribes worth almost $150,000 from contractors, according to an investigation which today concluded that he had "corruptly benefited" from the programme.

Benon Sevan, who yesterday resigned his post after launching a scathing attack on Secretary-General Kofi Annan, was said to be in a "precarious" financial position in 1998 when he began to take bribes to divert the strictly rationed allocations to a named oil trading company.

In its third report, the Independent Inquiry Committee also said that newly-uncovered emails raise further questions over the extent to which Kofi Annan knew of his son Kojo's involvement in the $64 billion scandal. The panel said that those questions would be answered in its final report, expected to be published next month.

Mr Sevan, a 67-year-old Cypriot, has retired but had been kept on a nominal dollar-a-year salary since being named in an interim report last year.

The post was held open to ensure he co-operated with the investigation and secured him diplomatic immunity over the affair. He is now open to a possible future prosecution but is believed to be sheltering in his native Cyprus.

Mr Sevan denies any wrong-doing and has said that he has been made a scapegoat for the inquiry which he believes to be politically motivated. He claimed that the money came from an elderly aunt, a retired Cyprus government photographer living on a modest pension until her death last year.

Alexander Yakovlev, a former UN procurement officer, is also accused in today's report of collecting $810,000 in kickbacks outside the oil-for-food programme. He resigned earlier this year.

Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who was appointed by Mr Annan to head the probe, released the panel's third interim report today. It called for the UN to waive Mr Sevan's immunity for the "purposes of a criminal investigation".

It also included a new allegation, that Mr Sevan took money from a contractor who bought oil from Iraq under the notionally humanitarian program which ran from 1996 until the US-led invasion of 2003.

The committee found that Mr Sevan took bribes for steering contracts under oil-for-food to a small trading company called African Middle East Petroleum Co. Ltd. Inc (AMEP) owned by a cousin of former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

It says that AMEP transferred $580,000 to the account of Fred Nadler, the brother of Boutros-Ghali’s wife Leia. Of this, Mr Nadler deposited $147,184 to the New York bank accounts of Mr Sevan and his wife.

For the first time the report provides a possible motive, describing how Mr and Mrs Sevan had repeatedly become overdrawn in their bank accounts. It says: "Mr Sevan corruptly and in concert with (Mr) Nadler and (Mr) Abdelnour derived personal pecuniary benefit through the programme through cash receipts from the sale of oil allocated by Iraq to Mr Sevan and bought by African Middle East Petroleum Co.

"The participants had knowledge that some of the oil was purchased by paying an illegal surcharge to Iraq in violation of United Nations sanctions and rules of the program."

The panel recommended that the United Nations now assists in ensuring diplomatic immunity is lifted, and co-operates with the possible criminal prosecutions.

Investigators found that Mr Yukolev secretly tried to bribe a company called Societe Generale de Surveillance SA, which was seeking an oil inspection contract under oil-for-food.

They said that Mr Yakovlev passed secret bidding information along to a friend in France, Yves Pintore, who then approached SGS to check if it would "work with" him and "influential people in the UN in New York."

Mr Volcker’s team found no evidence that the company agreed to the bribe. However, it noted that Pintore essentially agreed to its characterisation of his involvement.

The committee found "persuasive evidence" that Yakovlev took some $950,000 from other UN contractors outside oil-for-food.

The programme, which allowed oil to be traded to allow aid supplies to reach the country's population, was subverted by the Iraqi leadership which decided on the goods it wanted, who should provide them and who could buy Iraqi oil.

The Security Council committee's role was to oversee the sanctions and monitor the oil sales contracts. Saddam Hussein allegedly sought to win favour by giving former government officials, activists, journalists and others vouchers for Iraqi oil that could then be resold at a profit.

Mr Sevan, who criticized Mr Annan for "sacrificing" him and wrote a personal letter expressing his disappointment in Annan’s "failure to defend the historic achievements of the Oil-for-Food Programme".

He wrote: "I fully understand the pressure that you are under, and that there are those who are trying to destroy your reputation as well as my own, but sacrificing me for political expediency will never appease our critics or help you or the Organization."

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