For the first time since the eruption of the "oil-for-food" scandal, the head of the Romanian company Rompetrol Dinu Patriciu admits in an interview for Evenimentul Zilei it is possible that company money may have reached the pockets of the former Iraqi regime.
He admitted in the interview it would be childish to imagine that agents who worked for Rompetrol hadn’t pay bribes to the Saddam regime. "But without us knowing it. If we’d known about it, we would have stopped the payments immediately", he said, adding that the agent was a Jordanian company that operated like many others in this field.
Rompetrol announced last autumn it did not run any commercial activity in Iraq, but was shortly quoted by the UN in a report on corruption surrounding the oil-for-food program in the country.
Patriciu said categorically last October that his company was not involved in that scandal.
