New Delhi, October 31
External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh today dug in his heels in the United Nations’ Oil-for-Food Programme scam where he has been named as a non-contractual beneficiary and trashed the Volcker report as having ‘‘as much validity as the report by the CIA Director about the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq’’.

The Minister’s stand is that neither he nor his son, Mr Jagat Singh, or any of his relatives ever had anything to do with the kind of dealings or irregularities mentioned by the Volcker report.

Table 3 and 5 of the Volcker report are relevant in the context of Mr Natwar Singh’s alleged involvement in the Oil-for-Food Programme.

A direct reference to Mr Natwar Singh appears in Table 3 under the sub-heading: ‘‘Summary of Oil Sales by Non-Contractual Beneficiary’’ It identifies a Switzerland-based company ‘‘Masefield AG’’ through which the Minister and the Congress party had allegedly encashed the oil vouchers received from the Iraqi Government at a premium. It says the company was allocated four million barrels of oil, out of which 1,936,000 were actually lifted. The report identifies Mr K Natwar Singh as ‘‘member of Indian Congress Party’’.

Table 5 shows links between Singapore-based company Hamdan Export — which Janata Party leader Subramaniam Swamy has reportedly described as ‘‘a front company’’ of Mr Natwar Singh’s son Mr Jagat Singh — and Masefield AG.

The Minister, who has got a clean chit from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, seems to have got a concession from the Left Front which, unlike the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has not come out with any statement on the issue today. Besides, there are no indications that the Left parties will support the BJP when the latter raises the issue in the winter session of Parliament, beginning from November 23.

New Delhi, October 31
Still smarting on being named a beneficiary in the UN enquiry report on Iraq’s Oil-for-Food programme, the Congress is looking at the possibility of sending a protest note to the UN and the report’s author Paul Volcker.

At the same time, the party’s battery of legal experts is scrutinising the report to see what legal options are available to them under international law.

While their report is still awaited, senior Congress leaders indicated that the party could place its protest on record in a letter to the UN and Paul Volcker in which they will also point to the loopholes in the enquiry report and the discriminatory attitude shown towards the Congress.

AICC functionaries said they had examined all their old financial records and found nothing irregular which, it was stated, had given them the necessary confidence to question the insinuations against the Congress in the UN enquiry report listing beneficiaries of illicit payments in oil deals during Saddam Hussien’s regime. At the same time, the party is not discounting the possibility of an individual invoking the Congress name to seal a deal.

For the second day, the Congress steadfastly rejected the charge and in fact, went a step further to question the methodology used by the author in the preparation of the report. As on Saturday, the Congress confined its remarks to the party, stating that External Affairs Minister K.Natwar Singh, also named a beneficiary in the report, has already rejected the charge while the Prime Minister has stated that he stood by the minister.

Reiterating that the Congress has been incorrectly named, Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma said the report has “glaring errors and gaping holes” and that it cannot be accepted in toto. He said unlike other entities named in the report, no effort was made to seek the Congress party’s response to the charge. Besides this discrimination, Mr Sharma said there was also no corroborative evidence to support the charge against the Congress.

“These factual and procedural errors have put a question mark on the charges made in the inquiry report,” Mr Sharma added.