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Natwar Singh to represent India at 13th SAARC summit

     New Delhi: The Government of India said on Friday that External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh, named in Volcker report, will represent the country at the 13th SAARC Summit to be held in Dhaka from next week. Friday's announcement assumes significance in the light of the political controversy over the Volcker Inquiry Commission's report, which named both the Congress Party and Natwar Singh as indirect beneficiaries in Iraq's Oil for Food deals. The announcement came hours after Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Natwar Singh and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went into a huddle over the issue this morning. The government has now decided to form a loosely knit Group of Ministers to look into the Volcker report. The group will have Finance Minister P Chidambaram, Law Minister Bharadwaj, Home Minister Shivraj Patil and Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee on board. The Prime Minister's Media Advisor, Sanjaya Baru, said on Thursday that the Government was deeply concerned about the unverified references made in the Volcker Committee report to the Congress party and the External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh.

    Natwar Singh has been named in the recently released report of the Volcker Committee as "non-contractual beneficiary" of Iraqi oil sales in 2001 under the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme. The contracting company in both cases is named as Masefield AG. Singh is shown in Table 3 of the Report as the non-contractual "beneficiary" in connection with 4 million barrels of oil allotted to Masefield AG, the contracting company, which actually lifted 1.936 million barrels out of this. The phase in which the oil was allocated is shown as 9. "Under the programme," the Volcker Committee report says, "the Government of Iraq sold USD 64.2 billion of oil to 248 companies. In turn, 3614 companies sold USD 34.5 billion of humanitarian goods to Iraq... The Report illustrates the manner in which Iraq manipulated the Programme to dispense contracts on the basis of political preference and to derive illicit payments from companies that obtained oil and humanitarian goods contracts."

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