US legislators want Cyrpus to extradite UN official

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 13 (Reuters) Two US legislators asked Cyprus today to extradite Benon Sevan, a former UN official charged with accepting a bribe in connection with the oil-for-food program for Iraq.

Sevan, 69, the former head of the now-defunct billion program is the only UN official charged by US federal prosecutors for wrongdoing in the oil-for-food plan. He is accused of receiving some 160,000 dollars through an intermediary.

But as recently as last week, a Cypriot government official said in Nicosia said there had been no request for Sevan's extradition and that the island had laws prohibiting extradition of its nationals to third countries.

The two lawmakers were Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democratic who chairs the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, and the committee's ranking Republican, Rep.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida.

In a letter to Andreas Kakouri, the Cypriot ambassador in the United States, e-mailed to reporters, the members of Congress said Cyprus' membership in the European Union was seen as ''heralding a new era of international cooperation by your country.'' ''In this context, we trust that your government will undertake robust efforts to investigate, locate and extradite Mr Sevan, so that he may be fairly tried for his alleged violations of United States law and international confidence,'' their letter said.

Sevan, a native of Cyprus, was charged in federal court in New York last month, along with Ephraim Nadler, 79, a businessman and brother-in-law of former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Nadler was accused of funneling Iraqi money to Sevan.

Sevan has denied the charges through his lawyer, Eric Lewis, who said the United States was using his client as a scapegoat. When the UN program closed in 2003 Sevan turned over billion to the United States in Iraq, money that Lewis said ''vanished and has not been accounted for since then.'' The UN program was designed to soften the blow to civilians of UN sanctions against Iraq by allowing Baghdad to sell oil to finance purchases of humanitarian goods. The sanctions were imposed after Baghdad's troops invaded Kuwait in 1990. The oil program began in late 1996 and ended in 2003.

The former government of Saddam Hussein's raised 1.8 billion dollar through kickbacks and surcharges on the sale of oil in the program. But Saddam probably earned 10 billion dollar more from oil that he smuggled out of the country outside of the UN program, an independent probe of the program said.

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