NEW YORK: With his report on Iraqi oil deals creating a political storm in India, Paul Volcker, in a startling revelation, has said he agreed to change the language that referred to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's son Kojo's business dealings.

Mr. Volcker, who investigated allegations of corruption in the U.N.'s $64-billion Iraqi oil-for food programme, said he had no idea how much the 18-month probe would expose the vulnerabilities of the world body and how close he would come to toppling the Secretary-General as its leader.

``It had that potential from the start,'' Mr. Volcker said in an interview to Los Angeles Times. But when it came to the moment when he realised that Mr. Annan's job hung on his words, ``I felt uncomfortable,'' he said. The daily said that the U.N. chief and his lawyer asked Mr. Volcker to change the language about business dealings by Mr. Kojo Annan that they thought could force his father's resignation, hours before the publication of the draft forward of the report in September.

Harsh conclusion

Before releasing the September report on Mr. Kojo Annan, Mr. Volcker met the U.N. chief and his lawyer to discuss the harsh conclusion. ``The wording we had was that Annan's performance did not meet the standards of the United Nations,'' Mr. Volcker said.

Asked on Thursday, the day the controversial report in which External Affairs Minister K. Natwar Singh and Congress had been named as non-contractual ``beneficiaries'' of the programme, whether he thought the U.N. chief knew about his son's attempts to use his father's connections for his company's benefit, Mr. Volcker said, ``To this day, I still don't know.''

Annan's reaction

Mr. Kofi Annan's reaction, according to another person with knowledge of the meeting, was that the way the conclusions were phrased implied that he favoured Cotecna's (the Swiss firm for which Kojo worked) bid, and made him look so bad that it might force his resignation. Mr. Kofi Annan's lawyer, Gregory Craig, asked that the findings be dealt with separately, because Mr. Annan took responsibility for the management issues, but not for his son's behaviour, of which he says he had no knowledge. ``We presented the facts, and they spoke for themselves,'' Mr. Annan told The Times about the meeting. Mr. Volcker agreed.

Even if he had doubts that Mr. Kofi Annan was unaware of Cotecna's bid, he was convinced that Mr. Annan had not influenced the contract. It was not worth toppling a secretary-general. ``No one ever said he had influenced the process, and that was an important consideration,'' Mr. Volcker said. ``That he did not do a proper investigation [of his son's possible conflict of interest] was the key point. It would have saved him a lot of trouble.''

``The U.N. is an important institution, and it had a problem,'' Mr. Volcker said. Mr. Volcker understood that clarifying what Mr. Annan knew about his son's dealings was central to the investigation, and he devoted months to following leads, the daily said.

He concluded that Mr. Kojo Annan dealt in a shady world of many bank accounts, false contracts and friends of convenience. But there was no evidence, he said, that Mr. Annan influenced the award of the contract, or even definitively knew that his son's company was bidding for it. ``Nobody disagrees that there were four or five times when you raise your eyebrows and say, `Didn't it dawn on Kofi that Cotecna was involved?' But then you say, `Then again, maybe not,''' Mr. Volcker said. — PTI

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