he was elected to the short-lived 12th Lok Sabha (1998–99) from Bharatpur. However, he had to sit in the opposition benches, and then he lost the elections of 1999. After a further hiatus of three years, he was elected (indirectly) to the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan in 2002. The Congress party came back to power in 2004, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointed Natwar Singh as the Minister for External affairs. Oil for Food scandal Singh assumed office on 23 May 2004 as India's minister for external affairs. His tenure proved controversial. On 27 October 2005, while Singh was abroad on an official visit, the Independent Inquiry Committee headed by Paul Volcker released the report on its investigation of corruption in the Oil-for-Food program. It stated inter alia that "India's Congress party" and Natwar Singh's family were non-contractual (corrupt) beneficiaries of the Oil for Food programme. The report stated that Natwar Singh, his son Jagat Singh and Jagat's childhood friend Andaleeb Sehgal, were associated with a company called Hamdan Exports, which acted as an intermediary for illegal sales of oil to a Swiss firm named Masefield AG. In return for these illegal sales, Masefield paid kickbacks (termed "surcharges"), partly to Saddam Hussein's regime and partly to Natwar Singh and others. It was alleged that such kickbacks were Hussein's way of securing support from politicians around the world and that this benefit influenced Natwar Singh to lobby against US policies in Iraq (in particular, US sanctions on Saddam Hussein). Anil Mathrani, then Indian Ambassador to Croatia and formerly a close aide to K. Natwar Singh, alleged that Natwar Singh had used an official visit to Iraq to procure oil coupons for Jagat Singh from Saddam's regime. The long knives On 26 March 2006, the Indian Enforcement Directorate (ED) announced that it had finally tracked a sum of eighty million rupees, transferred from London-based Non-resident Indian businessman Aditya Khanna's bank account to his own NRI account in a Delhi bank, and later withdrawn from this account to be allegedly distributed among Indian beneficiaries of the scam. An old family connection between this businessman (Aditya Khanna) and Natwar Singh's family was dredged up. In August the same year, the Justice Pathak committee, which was investigating the case, released its judgment accepting this averment. The committee found that Andaleeb Sehgal, a friend of Jagat Singh, and Aditya Khanna, a relative of Natwar Singh, received