NEW YORK, Jan 7: The head of United Nations scandal plagued oil for food programme investigation commission, Paul Volcker said on Friday that the initial report on the issue will not produce any "smoking gun" , saying that the charges of illegal profits of $10 billion to 20 billion were "grossly exaggerated."

In an interview with the New York Times days before releasing the much anticipated initial report on the programme, amid charges of corruption in the United Nations system, Mr Volcker said "I don't know what we're going to be able to say at the end of January about some of this stuff. What we said is, we'd issue this report in January, but it's going to be a real squeeze."

The investigation led by Mr. Volcker, is examining the 1996 to 2003 United Nations aid programme that was intended to ease the effects of sanctions on Iraqi civilians. Saddam Hussein diverted billions of dollars from the programme with illicit oil sales, surcharges and bribes.

Mr Volcker asserted that the media estimates of illicit oil-for-food profits of $10 billion and $20 billion were "grossly exaggerated." His own investigation, he said, was turning up a number close to the $1.7 billion that Charles A. Duelfer, the top American inspector for Iraq, arrived at.

The commission will also release more than 400 pages of internal audits that Congressional committees conducting their own investigations have been seeking and Mr. Volcker said his office might make them public as early as next week.

"They are professionally done, very detailed audits focusing on the control system and how it should be tightened up, but they don't prove anything," he said. "There's no flaming red flags in this stuff."

The UN oil for food programme for Iraq has been a focus of attention of the US administration and the lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and has strained relations between the world body and world's most powerful nation.

Some US lawmakers and the right wing media called for the resignation of UN Chief Kofi Annan and prosecution of head of the programme Benon Sevan. Mr Volcker, a former head of the US Federal Reserve chosen to head the investigation by Mr Annan, complained in the interview that he was not getting cooperation from Washington.

"I hate to make a sweeping statement, but we get better cooperation from many other countries than we do from the United States," he told the paper. Far larger amounts, he told the paper, came from smuggling, much of which was tolerated by the United States.

"In two cases, Jordan and Turkey, the United States government officially recognized it was going on," he said, "because they gave waivers allowing the violations of oil sanctions because of the countries' friendship and importance to the US".

Mr. Volcker said that his report would look specifically at how the United Nations used the estimated $1.4 billion from the 2.2 per cent fee it received for administrative costs, how the banks and inspectors monitoring the programme were chosen and how the contractors were selected.

Of particular interest, Mr. Volcker said, was the replacement of Lloyds Register of Shipping, a British customs service that monitored sales under the programme, in 1998 by Cotecna Inspection Services, a Swiss company where Kojo Annan had worked.

"You know his son was employed by this company, you know he knew his son was employed by the company, you know a few other things, but suppose you have no evidence Kofi influenced the process," he said. "You find an e-mail, or somebody who's squealing, then you have the proof, but without it you're left with the difficult task of trying to prove a negative."

"While we keep learning things and we will answer the question pretty quick," Mr. Volcker said, "I don't know that we'll be able to do it by the end of January." Mr. Sevan has been accused of accepting illegal oil allocations worth millions of dollars.

As regards the UN official Mr Sevan Volcker said the Sevan case was easier because there was a paper trail. "You got a lot of documents that suggest strongly that Iraq thought he was the ultimate beneficiary," he said, "but the oil doesn't go to Sevan directly, it goes to somebody else, and that somebody else presumably makes a good margin, but who in the end made the money?