Oil-for-food documents 'falsified': Russia

Some of the documents transmitted to Russia by the independent commission investigating alleged fraud in the UN oil-for-food programme for Iraq bore falsified signatures, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday.
"The documents that they have shown us were falsified. They contained falsified signatures of Russian officials," Lavrov was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying.
Lavrov said Russia had asked the UN commission to identify the source of the documents in question. His comments came a day after the inquiry commission, led by former US central bank chief Paul Volcker, published a list of prominent corporations and individuals from many countries linked to evidence of alleged illegal surcharges and kickbacks paid to Iraq under the UN programme.
Several Russian politicians - notably Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party - have been among those accused of profiting from illegal oil-for-food contracts.
Both men issued vehement denials of the accusations, with Zyuganov calling them a "canard".
"I have not seen the report itself," Lavrov said. "But I think the facts that may be in it need to be studied very carefully. I say 'may be' because we have been in contact more than once with the Volcker commission, at its request, and the documents that they have shown us were falsified."
Lavrov also said that part of the information sent by the commission to Russia was not backed up by any documented evidence.
In addition to Russian companies and personalities, major firms in Europe and North America such as Siemens, Texaco, Volvo Group and BNP Paribas were among those named in the report published Thursday, backed up with copies of signed letters, bank transactions and interviews.
The Volcker commission spent 18 months examining what went wrong with the UN oil-for-food programme that ran from 1996 to 2003.
Amid fears ordinary Iraqis were suffering under international sanctions, the UN Security Council set up the programme to allow Baghdad to export a limited amount of its oil to purchase food and medicine under UN supervision.
The inquiry committee, however, found that Saddam's regime manipulated the programme to extract 1.8 billion dollars in surcharges and bribes while an inept UN headquarters failed to exert administrative control.