US: Capitol Hill is expected to witness a lively match-up today between George Galloway and Senator Norm Coleman, who has alleged that the British MP was awarded profitable oil trading rights in the years before the Iraq war.
Mr Galloway, who has strongly denied the charge, travelled to Washington yesterday for today's hearing of the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, which is chaired by the Republican senator from Minnesota.
The committee yesterday also targeted Russia in its investigation of the UN oil-for-food programme, claiming in an interim report that President Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party received oil allocations in an attempt by Iraq to strengthen Moscow's opposition to sanctions against Iraq.
Before leaving London, Mr Galloway said that the committee's claim last week that Saddam Hussein personally granted him the rights to trade 20 million barrels of Iraqi oil "was a monstrous abuse of natural justice".
"The committee came to its conclusions without any questions or contact being made with me . . . and I am going to put them on trial, the villains of the piece - the US government and those politicians who support it," Mr Galloway said.
"I am going to accuse them of being involved in a huge diversion from the real issues in Iraq, which are the theft of billions of dollars worth of Iraq's wealth by the USA and its corporations, and the deaths of more than 100,000 people in Iraq."
Mr Galloway was re-elected to Westminster this month as a member of the Respect Party which he formed after being forced out of the Labour Party over his strong opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
Mr Galloway told Reuters: "I have never traded in a barrel of oil, never seen a barrel of oil. I keep saying this.
"If I had ever sold oil to anyone or if anyone had given me a cheque for millions of dollars you would already know about it. That person would be standing in the media saying, 'I'm the man he sold the oil to, I'm the man who gave him X million dollars'.
"No such person exists, no such person can be produced so we're back down to my name being written on a piece of paper by who knows whom and who knows when."
Mr Galloway has won legal battles against the Daily Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor for making much the same charges as the Senate panel, which maintains that there is documentary evidence that the MP was allocated 20 million barrels of oil between 2000 and early 2003 through companies owned by a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zureikat.
The subcommittee claims to have evidence that Mr Galloway used a charity for children's leukaemia to conceal payments, a reference to the Mariam Appeal charity set up by the MP to help an Iraqi girl suffering from leukaemia and which received £400,000 from Zureikat, who has admitted trading in Iraqi oil.
The claims against Russian officials were made on the basis of interviews with former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz and other officials.
The committee claimed that a money trail led to Alexander Voloshin, former chief of staff to Russian President Vladimir Putin and to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultra-nationalist parliamentarian, but it did not cite any evidence that Mr Putin knew of this.
Russia's deputy prime minister Yury Fedotov told the Interfax news agency that they had seen no materials "that could prove or suggest that Russian companies or individuals which took part in the oil-for-food programme broke any law".