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Drug firms probed in Iraq scandal

LONDON, England (AP) -- Britain's Serious Fraud Office has demanded documents from three major drug makers in connection with allegations the companies paid bribes to secure lucrative contracts in Iraq while Saddam Hussein was in power, the companies said.

GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly and Co. Ltd. -- the British affiliate of Indianapolis, Indiana-based Eli Lilly and Co. -- are all accused of violating the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, established in the mid-1990s to ease the impact on Iraqis of sanctions imposed on Saddam's regime after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Under the program, money from Iraqi oil sales was to have been used for food and medicine.

All three companies have denied wrongdoing and said they were cooperating with the investigation.

The fraud office launched an inquiry after former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker detailed the scope of the corruption that marred the oil-for-food program.

His report, released in October 2005, accused 2,200 companies from some 40 countries of colluding with Saddam's regime to bilk the humanitarian program of $1.8 billion.