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UNITED NATIONS—The U.N.’s highest internal judicial body has ordered the United Nations to pay legal fees to the former chief of its oil-for-food program, who has been accused of accepting money to illegally influence the $64 billion humanitarian program in Iraq.
The program was the biggest humanitarian program in U.N. history, but a U.N.-sanctioned investigation found widespread corruption, involving thousands of parties, that bilked the humanitarian program of $1.8 billion. The program chief, Benon Sevan, has been charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for allegedly accepting $160,000 to illegally influence the program. The Administrative Tribunal’s judgment, obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, said the United Nations must pay “all reasonable legal fees” incurred by Sevan until February 2005, subject to an independent audit of the lawyers’ invoices. The judgment said Sevan and his lawyers were seeking $880,300, plus interest. Under the oil-for-food program, which ran from 1996 to 2003, Iraq was allowed to sell oil provided most of the money went to buy humanitarian goods. It was aimed at easing Iraqi suffering under U.N. sanctions imposed after Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and was a lifeline for 90 percent of the country’s population. But a 18-month U.N.-sanctioned investigation led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker found massive corruption in the program. Its final report in October