External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh has decided to make a suo motu statement in Parliament on allegations that he was a beneficiary in Iraqi oil deals during the Saddam Hussein regime as claimed in a UN report, which he rubbished as baseless and untrue.
"I am not going to speak through the media. I will make a suo motu statement when Parliament meets (later this month)," he told PTI on Wednesday.
The external affairs minister drew attention to the fact that Russia, whose some top-level functionaries figure in the report prepared by former US Federal reserve chairman Paul Volcker, had also stated that many of the documents produced by the report were dubious or falsified.
He pointed out that his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov has been quoted as saying that in a number of instances, the Commission presented Russia with rather dubious or clearly falsified documents concerning Russia's participation in the Oil for Food Programme.