The Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein, provided senior Russian officials with oil rights worth millions of dollars under the oil-for-food program in an effort to lift UN sanctions against Iraq, according to a US Senate Committee report released yesterday.The oil allocations were “compensation for support,” Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.The report, based on documents as well as interviews with Ramadan and Tareq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, pointed to Alexander Voloshin, former chief of staff to President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Presidential Council, and ultranationalist parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Both men had been listed in an October CIA report by Charles Duelfer, a former US and UN weapons inspector. But the new report produced documents on how the transactions were made, the shell companies in Cyprus, Switzerland and elsewhere and the involvement of Bayoil Inc., whose executives were indicted by US prosecutors last month.There is no evidence Putin knew of the payments, Senate investors said.

Zhirinovsky and his Russian Liberal Democrat Party were awarded the rights to sell 75.8 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil from June 1997 to December 2002, the report said. Those contracts could have netted Zhirinovsky and his party $8.679 million in profits, it added.The panel estimated nearly $3 million was paid to the Russian Presidential Council, either through Voloshin or his confident Sergei Isakov. At the same time the transactions resulted in $5.6 million in kickbacks to Saddam’s government.

They were sold through a subsidiary of the Russian oil giant Rosneft, the report said. “The purpose of these hearings is to lay out in detail ... the massive volume of allocations to Russia when Russia is an oil-exporting nation,” Sen. Norm Coleman, the Minnesota chair of the panel, told a telephone news conference.

Voloshin and Zhirinovsky previously denied the allegations and the Russian officials had said they would wait for a definitive report from Paul Volcker, appointed by the United Nations to conduct a independent inquiry on the defunct scandal-tainted $67 billion program that began in late 1996 and ended in 2003.

<B>United Nations Security Council</B>

The Russian allegations are part of a hearing today, which is also expected to include an appearance by maverick British parliamentarian George Galloway. He has denied allegations he accepted 20 million barrels of oil allocations.UN officials, the United States and Britain as well as France in 2001 attempted to cut down the UN list of 700 so-called oil buyers, which Saddam was allowed to choose under the program. But Russia refused in a UN Security Council panel, set up to supervise the program, participants said.

Some of the payments to Saddam came in surcharges on oil sales in his attempt to erode sanctions and offer bribes to politicians around the world. The program was created to allow Iraq to sell oil and buy food and other goods to ease the impact of 1990 UN sanctions.For several allocations awarded to the Russian Presidential Council, Bayoil contracted with shipping companies to lift the Iraqi oil and send it to end users.

The report said payments from Bayoil to the allocation holder and the designated purchasing agent, such as Rosneft, were often routed through a company, which had no record in oil deals. One such firm was Haverhill Trading Ltd., based in Cyprus.The Duelfer report estimates Iraq was able to pocket some $228 million in surcharges as part of a wider scam of $1.5 billion under the oil-for-food program. Another $8 billion came from selling subsidized oil to neighbors Jordan, Turkey and Syria outside of the UN program.

<B>Evelyn LEOPOLD</B>