Anyone who stole from the UN's oil-for-food programme for Iraq must stand trial and the money be repaid to the Iraqi people, Iraq's human rights minister said on Friday. Bakhtiar Amin praised Thursday's report by Paul Volcker, the former head of the US Federal Reserve charged with probing corruption in the programme, and said it revealed that even UN dignitaries were not above robbing the poor for profit. "It shows that some so-called dignitaries had not an iota of shame in their bones, no conscience and no morals," Amin told Reuters in an interview. "They profited as parasites on the misery of an impoverished nation."He revealed he personally had experienced the corruption, saying a Lebanese man was named in the report who had been involved in his father-in-law's 1994 assassination in Lebanon by Saddam Hussein's agents. "The oil-for-food programme was used to fund terrorism, international terrorism," the minister said.
Benon Sevan, a Cypriot who ran the humanitarian programme, was accused in the report of repeatedly soliciting and getting Iraqi oil allocations for a trading firm connected to the family of former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The senior UN diplomat's conduct was "ethically improper and seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations," Volcker's interim report into the running of the now-defunct $67 billion programme said.