Former French minister faces oil-for-food inquiry

The magistrate, Philippe Courroye, is expected to visit the United States in the next few days - and wants to visit Baghdad - to verify the allegations made by US Senate and UN investigators.

The broad allegations against M. Pasqua - a former supporter of President Jacques Chirac but estranged from him 10 years ago - have already been published by the Senate and the UN. The documents sent to M. Courroye are said by the French media to contain more details from Saddam-era Iraqi documents, suggesting that M. Pasqua and the 11 others were given vouchers to trade millions of barrels of oil which were supposed to generate funds for food and medicine to help the Iraqi people.

However, there has been no evidence to show that the vouchers were actually redeemed.

M. Pasqua has denied the allegations. He says that someone may have misused his name but that he never benefited personally from the 11 million barrels of oil placed beside his name in Iraqi oil ministry documents.

M. Courroye is also investigating allegations that the Saddam administration gave a similar sweetheart oil deal - worth millions of dollars - to a French priest, Father Jean-Marie Benjamin. The priest, who has lived in Rome since the mid-1970s, was a frequent apologist for the Saddam regime and claimed to be a friend of Saddam's foreign minister Tariq Aziz.

The $64bn (£37bn) oil-for-food programme, which ran from 1996 to 2003, was set up to allow Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil under the UN economic embargo imposed after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. According to investigators, Saddam manipulated the rules to allow him to bribe supporters in the West. They were allocated licences to trade oil, which enabled them - in theory at least - to make a profit of several dollars on each barrel.

According to the US Senate report, sent to M. Courroye, the deposed dictator approved an allocation of 11 million barrels to Charles Pasqua between May 1999 and June 2000. The former Iraqi president personally approved an allocation of three million barrels to M. Pasqua on 17 June 1999, it says. It says the Iraqi official documents record that "Pasqua's agent, Bernard Guillet (a former adviser to M. Pasqua, who has been placed under investigation), had declared that M. Pasqua wanted a Swiss company called Genmar to contract for his allotted oil".

M. Courroye is expected to travel to Washington and New York shortly to try to verify the allegations. He has also asked the Paris public prosecutor's office for permission to visit Baghdad. After the kidnapping of three French journalists in the past year, the French government has been pleading with all its citizens to leave Iraq. In these circumstances, the public prosecutor may decide that it would be unsafe for the judge to go to Baghdad in person.

The Senate report, published in May, focused on the accusations against M. Pasqua and against George Galloway, the British MP who was also alleged to have profited from oil allocations. The MP flew to Washington to rebut the charges before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Several separate investigations are under way into the oil-for-food scandal, including the UN's own inquiry led by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Mr Volcker's team is due to deliver its next report next month.

A UN official has been fired in connection with the scandal, of which detailed allegations first surfaced in January last year. The US Justice Department has set up a criminal investigation that has led to the indictment of three businessmen. An Iraqi-American has admitted being an illegal agent for Saddam's government and helping skim money from the oil-for-food scheme.