The chairman of a House subcommittee investigating the United Nations' oil-for-food program in Iraq said in a statement Tuesday that Secretary-General Kofi Annan's son received reimbursements for health insurance coverage through June of this year from a Swiss inspection company that is being investigated for alleged fraud and abuses in the program.

Annan's son, Kojo Annan, was employed from December 1995 until the end of 1998 by Cotecna Inspection Services, a company based in Geneva that was involved in the oil-for-food program. On Monday, the United Nations confirmed that Kojo Annan received nearly $2,500 a month after leaving the company, payments that did not cease until February 2004.

Information about the company's financial relationship with Kojo Annan has emerged over time, as various investigations into the oil-for-food program have progressed. On Nov. 15, a Senate subcommittee investigating the program estimated that during 13 years of international sanctions, Saddam Hussein's government made at least $21.3 billion illicitly - more than double previous government estimates.

Kofi Annan said Monday that although he and his son had discussed his son's relationship with Cotecna, a major U.N. contractor, he was "disappointed" that he had apparently not been told the full story about the payments. He also denied any wrongdoing, saying he had no role in granting the inspection contract to Cotecna or any other contractor. But he acknowledged that disclosure of the payments to his son and the scandal that has engulfed what was the United Nations' largest aid program had created a "perception of conflict of interests and wrongdoing."

The statement Tuesday about Kojo Annan's health insurance coverage was made by Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., the chairman of the House subcommittee on national security, emerging threats and international relations. It retracted an assertion Shays made Monday that Cotecna had misled his panel by failing to disclose that Kojo Annan had received the payments, totaling as much as $150,000, from Cotecna after he had left the company in December 1998 as part of an agreement not to compete with the firm in West Africa.

Shays' statement said that although the documents provided by Cotecna did not explicitly assert that the monthly payments were part of the "non-compete" agreement he signed in 1999, "the subcommittee is satisfied that Cotecna has, to date, complied with the subpoena for all documents relevant to our investigation."

The company said the payments were legal and required by Swiss law in such agreements. Seth Goldschlager, a spokesman for Cotecna in Paris, said Tuesday that the health care coverage was part of that non-compete "compensation" package.