– Natwar Singh thrown out!

Real Action or another ploy??? Seems latter with Singh still holding the Cabinet post…

India’s Natwar Singh, facing allegations of corruption after being named in a United Nations report, has been stripped of the foreign affairs portfolio, said Sanjaya Baru, media adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The UN report by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker named India’s ruling Congress party and Foreign Minister Singh as illegally benefiting from a UN program that was designed to allow Saddam Hussein to sell oil to buy food, medicine and other goods.

The Volcker report said as many as 2,253 companies worldwide and other individuals paid illegal kickbacks to Iraq to win business from the $69.6 billion program, created and designed by the United Nations as an exemption to oil-trading sanctions imposed on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Natwar Singh will continue to be in the cabinet as a minister without a portfolio, Baru said in an interview in New Delhi today.

India on Nov. 3 said it is “deeply concerned about the unverified references” made about the ruling Congress party and Natwar Singh, 74, in the Volcker report on corruption in a United Nations aid program in Iraq.

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