UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Monday said he was disappointed in new revelations about payments to his son from a firm that had a contract under the UN's oil-for-food programme in Iraq. The announcement came hours after a columnist in a leading US newspaper, the New York Times, called on Annan to resign over the mounting Iraqi oil scandal.
Annan's spokesman on Friday admitted that the UN chief's son Kojo kept getting payments from Geneva-based Cotecna until February 2004, years later than had been earlier reported, after a US newspaper broke the story last week.
"Naturally, I was very disappointed and surprised," Annan told journalists at UN headquarters in New York, adding that he had not known the payments had continued so long.
"He is an independent businessman. He is a grown man and I don't get involved with his activities - and he doesn't get involved in mine," the UN chief said.
But Annan added: "I understand the perception problem for the UN or the perception of conflict of interest and wrongdoing."
The US Congress and Annan have both ordered separate investigations into oil-for-food, amid allegations that UN officials were among hundreds of governments and officials bribed by Saddam Hussein's regime.
The payments to Kojo Annan, who had been employed by Cotecna, were a separate matter, made under a "no-competition" deal after he left the company to stop him setting up a firm to challenge Cotecna's business in west Africa.
His father on Monday said that, in line with earlier reports, he believed that the payments had stopped by 1999.
But Kojo's 2,500 dollar monthly payments did not stop until February 2004 - shortly after a Baghdad newspaper report set off international media focus on the troubled oil-for-food programme.
The programme, launched in December 1996 and terminated in November 2003, allowed Saddam's regime to sell oil under UN supervision in order to buy supplies to offset the effect of international sanctions on ordinary Iraqis.
US investigators believe Saddam's regime may have siphoned off billions of dollars from the programme.
Questioned by reporters on Monday, the US ambassador to the United Nations, John Danforth, declined to give a vote of confidence in the UN chief until the results of fraud probes had been released.
"I don't think that the United States government rushes to judgement until all the facts are in," Danforth said. "I'm not for prejudging anything. I'm for the absolute laying out of all of the evidence."
But he said that Paul Volcker, the man appointed by Annan to head an enquiry into oil-for-food, should release all relevant documents to congressional investigators immediately - something Volcker has indicated he would not do.
Annan said the oil-for-food issue has hampered efforts to push ahead with UN reform, with a new study due out Thursday on reforming the institution, and meeting an ambitious set of targets for global development.
"Obviously in this climate and with (these) oil-for-food discussions, it is not going to be easy. It wasn't going to be easy anyway. It is going to be much more difficult but we do have work to do," Annan said.
High-profile New York Times columnist William Safire on Monday wrote that it was time for Annan to step down - a suggestion that Annan's spokesman has already ridiculed - to help bring the scandal to an end.
"Its end will not begin until Kofi Annan, even if personally innocent, resigns - having, through initial ineptitude and final obstructionism, brought dishonour on the secretariat of the United Nations," he wrote.
A columnist in the Wall Street Journal meanwhile called Annan "a trimmer and a temporiser who has stood up for tyrants far more than he has stood up to them ... the UN is losing what shreds of moral legitimacy remain."