Volcker

New York, Nov. 24: For an embattled K. Natwar Singh, who is fighting to stay in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet, results of the first, tentative steps in the inquiry instituted against him are not encouraging.

Virendra Dayal, India’s special envoy, last night left New York for home with about 1,000 pages of documents from the Volcker Committee, but he said before leaving he had “no reason to doubt the authenticity of the documents” in the oil-for-food investigation by a UN-appointed, independent investigation.

Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, told Dayal that he was satisfied with the authenticity of the documents on the basis of which his committee had reached its conclusions.

Natwar’s strategy from the day his name came out in the oil-for-food scandal has been to impute motives to Volcker as an American and discredit his investigation.

Although Dayal was circumspect about his plans, sources privy to his thinking were categorical that as a follow-up to the documents handed over to India, the special envoy will have to visit Jordan, Switzerland and France to facilitate the work of former Supreme Court Chief Justice R.S. Pathak, who is looking into allegations against Natwar.

The Volcker report’s tables link alleged oil allocations in the name of Natwar to deposits in a bank in Jordan, while the company which lifted the oil is based in Switzerland. French banks have been involved in humanitarian supplies to Iraq and have been criticised in the report.

There have been suggestions here during Dayal’s visit that if India really wanted to get to the truth about deals involving the former external affairs minister and the Congress, it should question the deposed Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, and his top aides.

Sources associated with Volcker’s investigations said the committee agreed to hand over the documents only because Sudhir Nath, director of the enforcement directorate, accompanied Dayal to his meetings with Volcker.

The Volcker panel wants to ensure that its facts and testimony, procured from privileged sources with pledges of confidentiality, are used only for further investigations.

Sources in the UN and the Volcker Committee told this correspondent that before Dayal arrived here, India’s permanent representative to the UN, Nirupam Sen, had convinced both Volcker and UN secretary-general Kofi Annan that New Delhi was serious about the probe. It took only a day for Dayal to pick up the results of Sen’s legwork.

The 1,000-odd pages of documentation that is going to India not only includes material on Natwar, but also on several Indian companies named in the Volcker report.