Justice Now Or Never

A leading member of the Volcker committee revealed recently how governments could be gaining time, and justice losing it, for prosecutions in the oil-for-food scandal. All the documents with the Volcker committee—about 12 million pages—are, at the end of the committee's term, to be returned to where they came from. This is why Prof Mark Pieth, member of the Volcker committee, told a meeting of the anti-corruption group Transparency International in Berlin last weekend that these could well be the last few days for governments to launch prosecutions.

The Volcker committee's term was to expire November-end, but has been extended until December-end due to concerns over the documents in its possession. At the end of its term, "the committee will finish its work, the staff will go, and all the documents will be sent back to wherever they came from," Peter Rooke, Asia and Pacific region director of Transparency International, said from Berlin. And if that happens, "the task of prosecuting will be made vastly more difficult."

Many documents are from various ministries in Iraq, but they have come from several other places—governments, banks, companies—too, Rooke said. "The point is they are now in a central place, and no doubt have been carefully filed and indexed, so they can easily be accessed. But they can only be accessed if they remain where they are. If they go back, there is a danger they may not even survive the journey; there are plenty of people who'd like them to disappear."

That the Volcker committee may keep copies of the documents will mean nothing to prosecuting agencies. No government can seek copies of documents that would be seen as illegally held, nor could a wound-up committee offer the likes of stolen goods. Also, there are some documents which it can't reveal without a waiver from those whom it was obtained. This means that governments have just a few weeks for any real moves towards prosecution.

The committee has offered to share the documentation with a proper prosecuting agency or commission of inquiry. But the inquiry announced in India presents a confused picture: former diplomat Virendra Dayal has been asked to secure relevant documents from the committee; in addition, a commission of inquiry under former chief Justice R.S. Pathak will conduct investigations on the basis of the documents that Dayal obtains.

Initially, there was some doubt whether Volcker would consider Dayal a legitimate authority to hand the documents to particularly as he's an entity separate from the Pathak commission. But Indian officials at the UN say that Dayal fits the definition of 'legitimate authority'. At the time of writing of this piece, Dayal had left India for the US and should be meeting Volcker soon.

It isn't clear why the government decided to split the task of investigation between Dayal and Justice Pathak. An inquiry commission could have directly made a request for the documentation. Perhaps, the reason was that Dayal had been appointed as "special envoy" at the time Natwar Singh was still the foreign minister, consequently conveying the impression of clash of interest.

Critics, however, ask: why wasn't the task of securing documents transferred from Dayal to Justice Pathak after Natwar Singh demitted office? No other country has taken such a split approach. Rooke cites the example of Australia where "the government has set up a commission of inquiry into very large procurement of humanitarian goods in that country, particularly involving wheat." And Australia did not have to rope in a bureaucrat separately from the inquiry commission for the job.

In France, former ambassador to the UN Jean-Bernard Merimee has been charged by the judiciary with "influence-peddling" and "corruption of foreign officials" through the oil-for-food programme on the strength of its own inquiries even before the Volcker report came out. Merimee stands accused of selling vouchers for two million barrels of oil between 2001 and 2003 to two French companies operating in Iraq. Former ambassador Serge Boidevaix was charged with receiving vouchers for 32.6 million barrels.

Extension of the Volcker committee by another month now can mean either more time to launch a prosecution—or more of a time burden in which to fit actionism without action.