By Jeremy Scott-Joynt BBC News Online business reporter

Burning oil fields add to the problem

Companies, governments and lobby groups are circling, attempting either to claim as much money as possible - or to ward off the efforts of creditors so as to protect the reconstruction process.

On one side are the corporations with deals dating back 20 years or more, totalling - according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC - $57bn of the total $383bn (�247bn) in liabilities Iraq is burdened with.

Most of the pending contracts are unsurprisingly in telecoms and energy, and the contractors include companies from China, the Netherlands, France and the United Arab Emirates as well as a scattering of smaller fry.

Hungry bear

Russia's 90% share, though, is by far the biggest. And Russia is keen to collect.

You cannot strike out everything and start from scratch Alexei Kudrin Russian Foreign Minister

"We would like to think that, when sanctions are lifted, the post war Iraqi authorities will observe the principles of international law" and sit down immediately to talk terms, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin told the RIA-Novosti agency.

He also stoked the furore already beginning to build about who gets the contracts to rebuild Iraq, as the US prepares to sign off on a billion-dollar deal with its own corporations.

As far as Russia's oil and other firms were concerned, Mr Kudrin insisted, "You cannot strike out everything and start from scratch."

The firms, he said, "must be allowed to complete their earlier contracts".

Meanwhile, Korea's Hyundai is $1.1bn in the red thanks to its late 1970s push into Iraq, executive vice-president in charge of foreign contracts Min Su Kwang told the Wall Street Journal.

"We'll be in a much better position to get back the money, as they're sovereign debts owed to Hyundai," he said.

Vulture funds, investment vehicles which buy up long-defaulted debt at deep discounts and push to collect on it - often interfering with attempts to find a multilateral compromise in the process - are also likely to cause trouble.

In hock

Then there are the debts, mostly to foreign countries but also to individuals and companies. A massive slice of this, as much as $47bn on UN figures, is interest since Iraq has been in default ever since 1991, out of a total, according to the UN, of $127bn.

Once Saddam Hussein is gone, people will be swarming around Iraq like bees round a honeypot Bathsheba Crocker Addressing Iraq's debt problem

(The US Department of Energy thinks Iraq only owes half that.)

Again, Russia is a big player with $12bn, says Bathsheba Crocker from the CSIS, but others high on the list are the other Gulf States, who say Iraq owes them $30bn for help during its 1980-88 war with Iran, and Turkey, which is in for another $800m.

Kuwait's tab is $17bn, with another $70bn or so claimed in compensation - but that may be open to negotiation.

"Kuwait may come under pressure from the US to forfeit some of its claims," Neil Partrick from the Economist Intelligence Unit told BBC News Online.

Payback

Finally come the reparations - or rather compensation, as the UN prefers to call it. Iraq's oil is currently under UN control, officially at least, and 25% of revenues from the UN's Oil For Food (OFF) programme are earmarked to pay claims.

Oil and communications contracts still have to be settled

Over $16bn has already been paid, but there is already another $27bn in accepted claims to go.

Another $172bn has yet to be settled, with the bulk of this, unsurprisingly, coming from Kuwait.

More than a dozen other countries have claims for at least 1% of this amount, although neither the US with 2% nor the UK with 4% rank high on the list.

This, observers say, may have something to do with the fact that neither government seems to have paid much attention to the issue.