Benon Sevan, the former head of the UN Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, announced on Sunday his resignation from the United Nations, and criticized UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for failing to defend the world body.

In a personal letter to Annan, Sevan expressed his disappointment in Annan's failure to defend the historic achievements of the Oil-for-Food Program as well as his expedient abandonment of Sevan in the face of a politically motivated investigation.

"As I predicted, a high profile investigative body invested with absolute power would feel compelled to target someone, and that someone has turned out to be me. The charges are false and you, who have known me all these years, should know that they are false," Sevan wrote.

He noted that it is simply not credible that after running a US$64 billion program, he would have compromised his career for US$160,000, which represented gifts that he reported on his public disclosure forms.

"I fully understand the pressure that you are under, and that there are those who are trying to destroy your reputation as well as my own, but sacrificing me for political expediency will never appease our critics of help you or the Organization," he wrote to Annan.

"The only thing that will is to speak the truth and stand up to the political pressure from the adversaries of the United Nations," he concluded.

Sevan had retired from the United Nations but remained a UN staff member receiving only a symbolic salary of one dollar a year in order to help the investigation. He had also been suspended in February.

In a lengthy statement issued on Thursday by his lawyer Eric Lewis, Sevan expected to be accused of taking kickbacks under the US$64 billion humanitarian operation by the Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC), led by the former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

The IIC planned to release on Monday its third interim report on allegations of corruption in the humanitarian program for Iraq, which ran from 1996 to 2003.

(Xinhua News Agency August 8, 2005)