By Claudia Rosett
At United Nations headquarters, Secretary General Kofi Annan likes to imply that the Oil-for-Food era is over (“If there was a scandal” was his locution earlier this year). But Down Under, that landmark U.N. scam is right now all over the headlines. On Monday, Australia’s Cole commission released the findings of its year-long inquiry into some $220 million in kickbacks allegedly paid by the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) to Saddam Hussein’s U.N.-sanctioned regime under Oil-for-Food.In a nutshell, the inquiry has cleared the Howard government, but recommends pursuing possible criminal charges against a dozen individuals, eleven of them connected with AWB. Delving deeper into the report promises to be interesting. It runs to five volumes, totaling more than 2,000 pages — freighted with such Oil-for-Food-isms as arrangements to funnel money through “a Liechtenstein company with a Chinese name.”