Free Republic

The head of Brazil's state-run oil giant Petrobras and five senior executives have resigned in the wake of a huge corruption scandal. Maria das Graças Foster's departure follows the arrest and testimony of some three dozen executives at Petrobras and many of its suppliers. The board of Petrobras is due to meet on Friday to elect new executives. The scandal involves alleged price-fixing, bribes and kickbacks, which implicates Brazil's ruling party. Prosecutors have uncovered around $800m in bribes and other illegal funds. More than 200 businesses are being investigated and more than 80 people, including three former executives from Petrobras,...

Meet Benon Sevan, the man at the center of the Oil for Food scandal. NICOSIA, Cyprus--"Medium or sweet?" asks Benon Sevan. He is inquiring how much sugar I would like in the Turkish coffee he's boiling up for us on his kitchen stove, and I am torn between thanking him for his hospitality and wondering if he might poison the refreshments. For the past three years, we have had a somewhat fraught connection, via a shared interest in the biggest corruption scandal ever to hit the United Nations--he as a star suspect, and I in writing about it. So when,...

Documents released Wednesday by the House International Relations Committee offer the first real glimpse at just how close Oil-for-Food investigators came to concluding Kofi Annan lied to them, a finding that would almost certainly have brought about the U.N. secretary-general's downfall. The documents show a clear difference of opinion on Annan's testimony within the Oil-for-Food Inquiry Committee. Chairman Paul Volcker overruled the investigator who actually interviewed Annan. That investigator, Robert Parton, then resigned in protest. The documents include a transcript of a March 8 meeting between Volcker and other members of his team at which time they discussed Annan's role...

KOFI Annan's leadership of the UN is under renewed pressure after one of his key advisers admitted to financial links with Tongsun Park, the shadowy South Korean businessman and former playboy spy at the centre of US investigations into Iraq's oil-for-food scandal. Canadian Maurice Strong, a close adviser to Mr Annan and his special envoy to Korea, admitted Mr Park had invested in an energy company he was associated with in 1997 - the first full year of the oil-for-food program - but denied the funding had anything to do with Iraq. In a statement, Mr Strong said he "maintained...