Here’s a brief primer of the oil for food scandal situation:

To start, the UN’s program director, Benon Sevan, has been accused of receiving the rights to purchase millions of barrels of oil at “favorable conditions” - which means below market value by roughly 35 cents a barrel. (As part of the oil for food program, Saddam’s regime was given a set number of oil contracts that could be sold to international traders below market value).

He then allegedly passed those rights on to a company based in Switzerland (or Panama, depending on your news source) called Africa Middle East Petroleum. Who controls this company? Fakhri Abdelnour, a nephew of former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

From FT.com we read:

The Somo [which was Iraq’s oil marketing organizatin] documents show that, unusually, AMEP [Africa Middle East Petroleum, referenced above] was added to recipients in the middle of Phase Four (May-November 1998) after a visit to Baghdad by Mr Sevan. One letter, dated August 10 1998, was from Saddam Zayn Hassan, Somo’s executive manager, to Iraq’s oil minister. Translated from Arabic, it mentions AMEP as “the company that Mr Sevan cited to you during his last trip to Baghdad”.

No evidence of any financial relationship between AMEP and Mr Sevan has been established but investigators want to know what this letter means.

And here’s more:

Parallel inquiries by investigators working for the US Congress are scrutinising statements by Mr Sevan that he received tens of thousands of dollars in cash annually from an aunt in Cyprus.

Inquiries by the FT and Il Sole suggest Mr Sevan’s only close relative in Cyprus was Berjouhi Zeytountsian, an aunt who raised him after his parents’ death.

Ms Zeytountsian died in June. On March 23, she fell into an elevator shaft. Police, who declared her death an accident, never had a chance to interview her.

And we see more from the Google translated version of 24 Ore.com.

Abdelnour is not sure a personage above suspicion: in years 80 it has been one of the greater suppliers of oil to the Sudafrica in violation of the international embargo against the apartheid. The investigators of the UN have uncovered that every qualvolta that Abdelnour oed in visit in the offices of the ministry of the Oil to Baghdad introduced making the name of Sevan. Abdelnour has denied to have received oil allocation through Sevan and, in more occasions, it has declared to have only once seen Sevan in its life, in the lobby of the hotel Intercontinental di Vienna after one reunion of the Opec. In an encounter of all the accidental one to which several persons were present, included Youssef Ibrahim, a former journalist Egyptian its friend of infancy. But, from we caught up by telephone to Dubai, Ibrahim she has contraddetto Abdelnour, saying that after that accidental encounter to the Intercontinental, Sevan and Abdelnour three have gone with he to the restaurant of the Bristol hotel “for one pleasant supper we together”.

Summary:
So Sevan goes to Baghdad, right after that, AMEP, run by Abdelnour, nephew of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and apparent acquaintence of Sevan, gets contracts, SOMO references Sevan as the source that wanted the contracts to go to AMEP, and Sevan claims he was getting “tens of thousands” of dollars annualy from an aunt who mysteriously fell into an elevator shaft four days after the beginning of the investigation and never recovered from the coma.

Also, as I posted previously, keep an eye on the Friends of Saddam site, as it has some good information.