Annan in new probe

Kofi Annan's insistence he was unaware of a bid by a Swiss firm that employed his son for a lucrative contract under the scandal-tainted UN oil-for-food program.

UN-appointed investigators were "urgently reviewing" the memo, Michael Holtzman, a spokesman for the Independent Inquiry Committee led by former US.

Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, said on Tuesday.

The memo described a late-November 1998 Paris meeting of Annan with officials of Cotecna Inspection Services, just weeks before the Geneva-based company won the contract.

The contract has become a focus of Annan's critics, including several US Republican lawmakers who have accused him of mismanagement and called for his resignation.

Chief UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said Annan had no recollection of any such meeting during the trip to Paris, for a summit of French-speaking world leaders.

Annan's son, Kojo Annan, was a Cotecna consultant at the time of the encounter described in the memo, but it was unclear whether Kojo was present at the encounter. The document was written by Michael Wilson, a family friend of the Annans who was at the time a senior Cotecna executive.

The one-page Dec. 4, 1998, e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, was addressed to top Cotecna executives and devoted just two sentences to the UN contract matter.

It stated: "We had brief discussions with the SG and his entourage. Their collective advise (sic) was that we should respond as best as we could to the Q&A session of the (sic) 1-12-98 and that we could count on their support."

The memo was first disclosed by the New York Times.