Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is preparing to acknowledge that it should have known kickbacks were being paid to Saddam Hussein on oil it bought from Iraq as part of a defunct United Nations program, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

The admission is part of a settlement being negotiated with United States prosecutors and includes fines totaling 25 million to 30 million U.S. dollars, the report quoted the investigators as saying.

The penalty, which is still being negotiated, would be the largest so far in the U.S. in connection with investigations of companies involved in the oil-for-food scandal.

The 64-billion-dollar program was set up in 1996 by the UN Security Council to help ease the effects of UN sanctions on Iraqi civilians after the first gulf war.

Until the American invasion in 2003, the program allowed Saddam's government to export oil to pay for food, medicine and humanitarian goods.

However, the Iraqi government received at least 1.8 billion dollars in kickbacks from companies in the program, according to an investigation completed in 2005 by Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Source: Xinhua