According to the Berlin-based Die Tageszeitung, which says
it has a copy of parts of the dossier, the companies are among 150
from around the world used by Iraq to develop missiles or nuclear,
biological and chemical weapons.
But the dossier states that the British companies' activities in
Iraq all took place before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990,
according to the newspaper. The 17 names cited by the newspaper have
each previously been publicly identified as suppliers to the
programmes in the late 1980s and in 1990.
Die Tageszeitung has previously reported that the dossier
shows some German companies have co-operated with Iraq more
recently. It will report today on what the dossier says about
companies based in all five permanent members of the UN Security
Council, with evidence it says the dossier shows of heavy recent
involvement by Russian weapons-related companies in Iraq.
The British list includes at least six companies identified by
the US Treasury as Iraqi front companies, including Matrix-Churchill
and Endshire Export Marketing.
The British foreign office on Thursday would not
comment on the disclosures. But the UK government has supported
moves in the UN to remove company names from the copies of the
dossier to be distributed to non-permanent members of the security
council.
UN officials have argued this week that removing the names would
facilitate future co-operation on Iraq with the companies
involved.
The 24 US companies named include Hewlett Packard, Honeywell and
Rockwell, while the 10 French companies include Thomson-CSF military
and Protec.
Gary Milhollin, director of the Washington-based Wisconsin
Project, which keeps a database on companies that did business with
Iraq, said that if the German report was accurate, the declaration
about US companies appeared to contain information already known by
the west.
"All these names are familiar," Mr Milhollin said. "From the
Iraqi point of view, if they list a supplier, they have to list what
the supplier sold, and they're not going to reveal that if it's
something they don't want the US to know about."
