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Roger Simon's Mystery
OK. It's tinfoil hat time. Roger Simon begins with a mystery. Where is the Oil for Food investigation going?
I know - this blog seems obsessed with the Oil-for-Food scandal, but it is one of the greatest mysteries of our time and this blog is written by a mystery writer. And, as with any good mystery, you never know the identity of Mr. Big until the very last minute. Of course, in this case it has seemed for some time that Mr. Big's initial (pace Kafka) would be K. But who knows? There are nooks and crannies as far North as Ontario now. Surprises could occur.
Ontario? Does anything spooky ever happen in Ontario? In this case, maybe. Here's a chart I drew up based on known connections. ( see attached) A Canadian high-ranking UN official named Maurice Strong has resigned after being accused to being one of two officials who Saddam bagman Tongsun Park met. According to the Washington Post:
UNITED NATIONS, April 20 -- The United Nations' special envoy to North Korea, Maurice F. Strong, decided Wednesday to step aside until U.N.-appointed investigators and federal prosecutors finish examining his financial ties to a South Korean lobbyist accused of trying to bribe U.N. officials. The move comes less than a week after federal authorities charged Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman, with lobbying U.N. officials as an "unregistered agent" of Saddam Hussein. A witness said Park in 1996 and 1997 invested $1 million in Iraqi funds in a Canadian company owned by the son of a high-ranking U.N. official, a federal investigator said. Strong, a Canadian entrepreneur and environmentalist, acknowledged Monday that Park had invested money in a business he was "associated with" in 1997 and later advised him on his dealings with Pyongyang.
However, this same Maurice Strong has connections to Paul Martin, the Prime Minister of Canada who is now being accused of presiding over a decades long corruption scandal and to the French-Canadian Demarais family which have strong monetary connections to Total Elf Aquitane, which is alleged to have dealings with Saddam Hussein and BNP Paribas, the official bank of the Oil-For-Food program. The Guardian reported on April 6, 2003:
An Anglo-Iraqi billionaire who has close links to the Blair government, built his financial empire on peddling his influence with Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime - the Observer can reveal. ... Auchi was arrested last week in connection with a £26 million kickback scandal involving the French oil giant Elf-Aquitaine. His arrest is the latest spectacular twist in a story that spans three continents and involves an attempted assassination, two of Europe's largest political corruption scandals and a series of multi-million pound oil and arms deals with Saddam Hussein. An Observer investigation can today reveal how a man who built his fortune on secretive deals with the Iraqi regime came to mix with ministers in the Blair government.
Here are a few other snippets which are bound to add to the mystery. While these associations are circumstantial and by no means conclusive, it does serve as a useful roadmap for connecting the dots.
"On Friday, Mr. Hunt reported that Mr. Volcker is a close friend and paid adviser to billionaire Paul Desmarais Sr., who owns the Power Corp. of Canada. Power Corp. shares control of a holding company that is the largest single shareholder of the multinational energy firm Total, which received $1.75 billion worth of oil from Iraq. Total was in discussions with Saddam Hussein to develop oil fields in Iraq if sanctions were lifted (which would have made them worth billions of dollars more). Mr. Demarais' son is currently a director of Total." -- Washington Times
Just a month before the Canada Free Press revealed that Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, is a member of Power Corp.’s international advisory board–and a close friend and personal adviser to Power’s owner, Paul Desmarais Sr.–a U.S. congressional investigation into the UN scandal discovered that Power Corp. had extensive connections to BNP Paribas, a French bank that had been handpicked by the UN in 1996 to broker the Oil-for-Food program. In fact, Power actually once owned a stake in Paribas through its subsidiary, Pargesa Holding SA. The bank also purchased a stake in Power Corp. in the mid-seventies and, as recently as 2003, BNP Paribas had a 14.7 per cent equity and 21.3 per cent voting stake in Pargesa, company records show. John Rae, a director and former executive at Power (brother of former Ontario premier Bob Rae), was president and a director of the Paribas Bank of Canada until 2000. And Power Corp. director Michel François-Poncet, who was, in 2001, the vice-chairman of Pargesa, also sat on Paribas’s board, though he died Feb. 10, at the age of 70. A former chair of Paribas’s management board, André Levy-Lang, is currently a member of Power’s international advisory council. And Amaury-Daniel de Seze, a member of BNP Paribas’s executive council, also sat on Pargesa’s administrative council in 2002. -- Canada Free Press
A UN official said Mr Strong was in the Dominican Republic recuperating from pneumonia and would be making no public comments. Mr Annan, asked if he had known of the relationship between Mr Strong and Park, said he was not aware of it. Mr Strong was also a member of the board of Air Harbour Technologies, along with Mr Annan's son, Kojo Annan, whom the UN is also investigating for possible conflicts of interest in the award of an oil-for-food contract to Cotecna, a Swiss company that employed him. -- Sydney Morning Herald
Maurice Strong 68, and his wife, Hanne, fancy themselves quite the environmental couple. He was chairman of the far-out Earth Council, earning the nickname Father Earth. In 1992 he orchestrated the United Nations Earth Sumniit, which called on the developed world to fork over, for its environmental sins, $600 billion to the Third World. Together the Strongs run the private Manitou Foundation. A gathering place for religious sects (Hanne is into "spiritual interests"), it backs, among other things, research into ethnobotany-the interactions between humans and plants. ... Nevertheless, Strong's a chap to be reckoned with. Congress says that without belt-tightening the U.N. can kiss good-bye $I.'3 billion in back U.S. dues. He is the driving force behind a U.N. reorganization plan aimed at dealing with Congress' objections. ... Strong is up to his eyeballs in Molten Metal Technology, a busted handler of hazardous waste notorious for its flaky technology and ties to presidential hopeful Al Gore (FORBES, Jan. 22, 1996 and Apr. 21, 1997). A big contributor to Gore's campaigns, Molten Metals has surfaced in the Senate hearings on corrupt campaign financing. ... So how did Strong come to be picked to reengineer the U.N.? The way we hear it, former secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali wanted to recruit someone close to the current Administration. Strong, Al Gore's pal, fit the bill. Boutros-Ghali was tossed out last year, but his successor, Kofi Annan, allowed Strong to stay on. Strong says he doesn't want the U.N.'s head honcho's job. His mission, he says, is to save the the planet from industry's depredations. Will the real Maurice Strong please stand up? Global Policy Org, 1998
posted by wretchard at 10:52 AM
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2005/04/roger-simons-mystery-ok.html
UPDATE: Oil-for-Resignations
Key UN Oil-for-Food investigator Robert Parton, whose resignation several days ago was first reported on this blog, is going public with his accusations toward the Volcker Committee in two news reports this evening, one from the AP and one from the Telegraph.
Says the AP's Desmond Butler:
The investigator, Robert Parton, confirmed a report by The Associated Press earlier this week that he had resigned along with another investigator to protest recent findings by the committee that cleared U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan of meddling in the $64 billion program.
Parton's statement comes after a member of the committee discounted reports that the two investigators had left the Independent Inquiry Committee because they believed the report was too soft on the secretary-general.
"Contrary to recent published reports, I resigned my position as Senior Investigative Counsel for the IIC not because my work was complete but on principle," Parton said.
From the Telegraph:
Last night, in the most explicit criticism so far directed at the report, Robert Parton, one of the senior investigators, told a lawyer involved with the Volcker inquiry that he thought the committee was "engaging in a de facto cover-up, acting with good intentions but steered by ideology".
The lawyer, Adrian Gonzalez, told The Sunday Telegraph that he believed the committee, headed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was determined to protect the secretary-general.
According to Mr Gonzalez, Mr Parton felt that the committee had effectively divided the body of evidence relating to the oil-for-food scandal into testimony that it did want to hear, and testimony that it did not.
Much of what the Telegraph has to say is already familiar to readers of this blog, but now Parton has gone public. Undoubtedly, there will be more to come as other members of the committee have their say -- some of which may conflict with Parton and some not.
Meanwhile, Adrian Gonzalez has informed me that he was misquoted to some degree by the Telegraph. Gonzalez, the attorney for former Kojo Annan business partner Pierre Mousselli, says he has not spoken directly with Parton in some days and that Telegraph has exaggerated their report to some degree. Parton, Gonzalez believes, would not be so explicit in his criticisms. The reference to the "de facto coverup" were Gonzalez's words, not Parton's, although they may reflect the resigned investigator's feelings. In fact, in the end they don't seem so it odds with what what the investigator already told the Associated Press. He resigned "on principle."
However you parse this, the Volcker Committee is a now an unmitigated disaster. Just as it is ludicrous to think that Kofi Annan is the one to reform the United Nations, it is ludicrous to think this committee the means to investigate the scandal.
Posted by Roger L. Simon at 05:04 PM
www.rogerlsimon.com
Congress Probes Routing of Funds To Suspect Firms
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT - Special to the Sun
May 4, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/13260
WASHINGTON - Investigators looking into the U.N. oil-for-food program, poring over documents provided to Congress here, are discovering that vast sums intended for humanitarian purposes in Iraq were rerouted through a global web of companies with links to terrorist funding and arms trafficking.
The fresh clues to the money trail are emerging from a House hearing that focused last week on BNP Paribas, the French bank picked by the United Nations to service the bulk of the U.N.-supervised deals. At the hearing, one of its officers acknowledged a number of what he characterized as "mistakes" in the handling of funds under the oil-for-food program.
But the documents provided by BNP under congressional subpoena and examined by The New York Sun suggest to congressional investigators that some of these mistakes involved the rerouting of money through a global web of companies linked not only to terrorist funding and arms trafficking but also to anti-sanctions campaigning and front operations for the Iraqi regime itself.
Even in the context of an oil-for-food program that encompassed more than $110 billion of Saddam's oil sales and relief purchases, these payments to third parties were not small change. Payments rerouted inside BNP - against U.N. rules but evidently without protest from Turtle Bay - totaled at least $470 million, documents in the possession of Congress indicate.
Until last week's hearing by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, this maze of meandering money remained hidden from public view. The transfers took place by way of proceeds from letters of credit, with which BNP was supposed to guarantee payment from the U.N.-managed oil-for-food account to a given contractor, but instead sent the money to a third party, apparently with the consent of the contractors thus deprived of funds due to them. Whatever the aim, the effect was the secret transfer of money, in contravention of the strict controls oil for food was meant to impose on Saddam's business.
These breaches were obscured by a double-wall of BNP confidentiality and U.N. secrecy during its program, which ran from 1996 to 2003. Even today, not one of the ties associated with this money trail has yet been brought to light by the U.N.-authorized investigation launched almost a year ago by a former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker.
At last week's hearing, it turned out that BNP's New York branch redirected at least 403 payments from the U.N.-held oil-for-food account, sending funds in these cases not to the contractors approved by the United Nations for specific deals but to third parties. Why exactly BNP did so, and why the United Nations did not stop it, are questions into which investigators are still delving.
Other questions were raised by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican of California, who led the hearing. Mr. Rohrabacher asked not only whether BNP was in breach of its U.N. contract, but whether in light of the large sums transferred to some of the obscure or even, as the congressman put it, "shady" companies on the list, the bank had complied with know-thy-customer rules. BNP's chief executive for North America, Everett Schenk, defended the bank's actions, testifying that under the vast oil-for-food program, involving the processing of some 20,000 letters of credit, "mistakes are perhaps inevitable."
Mr. Schenk further noted that some of the third-party payments went to companies, or to "affiliates" of companies, authorized by the United Nations via separate contracts to sell goods to Saddam's regime under oil for food, and that BNP had relied on the United Nations to vet such companies. He added, "We do not believe that any of these departures from procedures that we've identified today have caused or contributed to corruption under the program."
There are 80 as-yet-undisclosed third-party payments still under review by BNP that, according to Mr. Rohrabacher, "BNP does not fully understand." The bank's own auditors found that the flow of oil-for-food paperwork was "irrational."
While some of the companies may be innocent and some of the transfers may have been simple mistakes, there are also signs that this list provides a map to at least part of the financial network Saddam used to evade U.N. sanctions and corrupt the U.N. program meant to contain him - as he was doing, according to testimony last fall of the Central Intelligence Agency's chief weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer.
The number of companies involved was relatively small, a few dozen out of the more than 3,000 contractors tapped by Saddam under U.N. terms that let him choose, subject to U.N. veto, his own business partners. Among several of this band, the rerouted payments were copious. In some cases, they form a latticework of disturbing associations. These include such U.N.-approved dealers as Al Wasel & Babel General Trading, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which sold $384 million of goods to Saddam under oil for food.
Last April, the U.S. Treasury designated Al Wasel & Babel as a front for officials of the Saddam regime. According to the Treasury, Al Wasel & Babel - under the guise of selling Saddam humanitarian goods - not only tried to buy a surface-to-air missile system for Iraq when it was under U.N. sanctions, but also "played a key role in the former Iraqi regime's schemes to obtain illicit kickbacks in goods purchased through the oil-for-food program."
As it turns out, BNP, by its own account, rerouted more than $5.7 million due to Al-Wasel & Babel to another company, Al Douh, in 2002. BNP's report to Congress describes this company as a Jordanian company with U.N.-approved affiliates, although Al-Douh itself was not a U.N.-approved dealer. But Al-Douh had other connections: BNP's roster of third-party payments shows that in the final year of oil for food, just before the American-led coalition overthrew Saddam in April, 2003, Al-Douh received more than $29 million redirected by BNP from funds that Saddam's regime owed to a South African company, Falcon Trading.
Falcon Trading belonged to a Detroit businessman, Shakir al-Khafaji. According to a Wall Street Journal report last year, Mr. al-Khafaji, a campaigner against U.N. sanctions on Iraq, not only brought American and South African political delegations to Baghdad to denounce American policy, but also funded an anti-sanctions documentary by a former U.N. weapons inspector, Scott Ritter.
The BNP record also shows in 2002 yet more money due to Falcon Trading under oil for food, totaling $2.5 million, was rerouted by the bank to a company called East Star Trading Company. East Star was not a U.N.-approved dealer, but received more than $100 million in third-party payments rerouted from a variety of U.N.-approved contractors. In BNP's report to Congress, East Star is described as registered in 1990 in the Cayman Islands and affiliated with a Malaysia-based company called Pacific Inter-Link.
Both companies are reported by BNP as 100% owned by yet another company, Commodities House Investment. Asked by Mr. Rohrabacher for details of who owns Commodities House Investment and who runs East Star, BNP's Mr. Schenk was unable to supply answers. "This stinks," Mr. Rohrabacher said.
BNP was able, however, to supply Mr. Rohrabacher with the information that whoever might have been in charge of East Star, the company over the period 2000-03 received more than $80 million in BNP rerouted oil-for-food payments that were officially due to a Saudi Arabia-based supplier, Al Riyadh International Flowers, which BNP described as "reportedly" owned by a member of the Saudi royal family, Prince Bandar Bin Mohammed Bin Abdulrahm Al Saud. He is not the Prince Bandar who is the Saudi ambassador to America.
The Prince Bandar in question also turns up personally on the list of BNP's third-party payments, as having received, in 1999, $353,500 rerouted from another of his companies, Zahrat Al-Riyadh. This in turn shows up on the BNP list as having had about $29 million in oil-for-food payments rerouted by BNP in 1999-2000 to the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool.
Along with receiving funds redirected from Al-Riyadh, East Star received third-party payments via BNP totaling at least $8 million from its U.N.-approved affiliates, Malaysia-based Pacific Inter-Link and three related companies in Southeast Asia (and more third-party payments reassigned from dealers in places such as Russia and Ukraine).
BNP's report to Congress notes that Pacific Inter-Link "is a member of the Yemen-based Hayel Saeed Anam Group, one of the oldest and most noted business conglomerates in the Arab world." The Hayel Saeed Group, with affiliates in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia, supplied hundreds of millions of dollars of goods to Saddam's regime via oil for food.
What BNP did not mention to Congress, though it was reported last fall by Fox News, in an article by this reporter and Fox News's executive editor, George Russell, is that both Pacific Inter-Link and the Hayel Saeed Anam Group have on their boards of directors a member of the family, Hayel Saeed Abdul Rahman, who was a charter member in 1984 of a business chamber founded in Lugano, Switzerland, by members of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood - the Malaysian, Swiss Gulf, and African Chamber, or MIGA. Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, MIGA was named by the United Nations as a terrorist-financing outfit, and added to the U.N. watch-list of entities belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda.
Pacific Inter-Link has denied any connection between MIGA and Mr. Abdul Rahman, who has recently been based in Jeddah. His name as of last fall was still on MIGA's Swiss registry documents, along with that of U.N.-designated terrorist financier, Ahmed Idris Nasreddin - with whom Mr. Abdul Rahman, via his family company, has stated he has had no dealings since 1984.
Amid this tapestry of multimillion dollar "mistakes" is a small, stray thread worthy of further attention. The BNP list includes a payment of $64,900, redirected in 1999 from a U.N.-approved dealer, Jugo Import Atera, to a Dutch company, BV Chemie Pharmacie. Jugo Import - or Yugo Import, as the name appears on the company's Web site, has been for decades the leading arms exporter of the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia. Yugo Import's Web site mentions not only that it specializes in military equipment and transfers of military technology, but that from 1975-90, more than three-quarters of its business abroad, or more than $7.5 billion, was done with Iraq - indicating weapons deals with Saddam's regime prior to sanctions. Why Yugo Import, during Belgrade's era of rule by U.N.-sanctioned Slobodan Milosevic, was approved by the United Nations to sell Saddam's U.N.-sanctioned regime such goods as "anti-snake venom" and "veterinary supplies" under oil for food is an intriguing question. Also intriguing is why it has only now emerged, under pressure from congressional investigators, that Yugo Import proceeds were diverted to a third party.
The BNP list of third-party payments goes on at great length, and more details will no doubt emerge. At least half a dozen of the companies involved in the rerouted payments were among the biggest 40 suppliers selected by Saddam under oil for food - all doing well over $100 million of business. That alone should sound alarms because Saddam's regime doled out contracts as favors, overpaying for relief supplies in order to skim funds by way of kickbacks. At least two of the U.N.-authorized companies from which payments were redirected, Al-Riyadh International Flowers and Pacific Inter-Link, showed up in a 2003 Pentagon study as having sold overpriced goods to Saddam - vegetable ghee overpriced by 28% or more, and palm oil overpriced by 15%.
It is possible all these connections are coincidental, or perhaps matters of benign convenience or accident, and that investigating them at leisure is reasonable. But on the chance that any part of this labyrinth might offer insight into the flow of funds with which Saddam bought or blackmailed pals who might even today be supporting terrorists in Iraq who are killing both American troops and Iraqi civilians, it seems worthwhile for other investigators - maybe even Mr. Volcker - to follow up quickly on the clues Mr. Rohrabacher and his colleagues have uncovered.
Ms. Rosett is Journalist-in-Residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Roger Simon comments -
Which Side Are You On - Again and Again
While certain reactionary individuals pretending to themselves that they are "progressives" or whatever continue to block John Bolton's nomination as UN Ambassador because of Bolton's alleged "bad manners," the really bad manners of the United Nations itself continue to be revealed, thanks, as per usual, to Claudia Rosett.
And today, as we learn about the hideous suicide murders in Erbil, she reports the UN ugliness is mounting.
But the documents provided by BNP [the French Oil-for-Food bank] under congressional subpoena and examined by The New York Sun suggest to congressional investigators that some of these mistakes involved the rerouting of money through a global web of companies linked not only to terrorist funding and arms trafficking but also to anti-sanctions campaigning and front operations for the Iraqi regime itself.
In other words, the UN Oil-for-Food program, which was meant for starving children, was financing both terrorism and a terror regime. Meanwhile, the likes of Barbara Boxer and Chris Dodd are concerned that an "ill-tempered" man has been nominated to clean this up. This is what "liberalism" has come to? How do these people look at themselves in the mirror?
Posted by Roger L. Simon
www.rogerlsimon.com
Letter to Volcker - Original Oil-for Food Document
Adrian Gonzalez-Maltes, attorney for Oil-for-Food witness Pierre Mouselli whose connections to Kojo Annan were detailed earlier on this blog and elsewhere, has written a lengthy letter to Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme. Dated today May 9, 2005, it begins:
Oh behalf of my client Pierre Mouselli, I would like to draw your attention to the treatement he has received from the Independent Inquiry Committee ("IIC") in the course of its investigation. Mr Mouselli is particularly concerned that you be informed of these facts in the light of the concerns you mentioned at your press conference on May 6 regarding persons in the investigation whose "lives are at stake."
The rest of this letter and accompanying documents are available for you to read at the Pajamas Media website. They include information about the behavior of the IIC or of some of its members that should be of interest to all, especially in anticipation of possible testimony by resigned Oil-for-Food investigator Robert Parton before Congressional Committees.
Although several in the media have received this letter or will receive it, we at Pajamas Media believe such documents should be available to the public in their entirety and not taken out of context or redacted. This is a web exclusive as of this moment.
www.rogerlsimon.com
Since the PDF file is too large to attach, please find the letter in its entirety at:
http://www.pajamasmedia.com/
Simon666
05-10-2005, 09:25 AM
http://wretchard.com/images/off.jpg
Bush Sr. <=> Salem Bin Laden
(connections with)
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\/ \/
Bush Jr. <=> 9/11 <=> Osama Bin Laden
(president during) (caused)
Can't squeeze the toothpaste back in the tube
Volcker says the evidence has immunity?
"Friday, at a hastily assembled press conference in New York, Mr. Volcker stepped forward to say he wants his evidence back. Mr. Hyde said no. That has triggered a potentially explosive showdown, pitting the powers of Congress against the privileges and immunities of the United Nations, which, by Mr. Volcker's account, extend to his "independent inquiry."All of which may be useful in illustrating the rules by which the United Nations, and now its "independent inquiry," play. Most involve the United Nations' climate of privilege and secrecy, whence sprang oil for food in the first place. Mr. Volcker's inquiry, for example, is funded at the behest of Mr. Annan
Were Mr. Hyde to comply with Mr. Volcker's demands, but send back the Parton papers in a manner consistent with the U.N.'s own recent record of dealing with Congress, it would be a long handoff. Congress is still smarting over the time it took the United Nations to turn over its oil-for-food internal audits.
Mr. Volcker's March report on Kofi Annan and Kojo Annan failed to mention that the younger Annan had served on the board of directors of a now-defunct company, Air Harbour Technologies, first alongside the U.N. secretary-general's special adviser, Maurice Strong, and then alongside an adviser for U.N. oil-for-food contractor, Cotecna Inspections. Mr. Strong has taken leave from his U.N. job until information about some of his own business connections can be clarified, part of a tangle arising from a federal bribery complaint issued last month and related to oil for food."
Maurice Strong's name keeps coming up in various articles. If you remember he is the person who promoted the Kyoto Protocols into existence and former president Clinton signed the agreement just before his final term was up. President Bush however killed it as soon as he was sworn in to office. Now a story has arisen about 17,000 scientists saying its based upon "bad" science and its a major Scam. It was signed into law in Canada and has already had cost overruns of $5 Billion Dollars just for starters. Its hard to think of a bigger Scam than "Oil for Food" but the Kyoto Protocols could surpass it easily and could ruin the industrial nations of the western world besides. The same type of scheme is before the Senate for ratification and its called, "Laws of the Sea" and it is a hot item for the Democrats.
The "Law of the Sea" is a UN thing and there are taxing provisions that could give the UN more money than any existing nation now in existence. Lots of liberal Senators like Kerry, Kennedy, Feinstein etc. have voted for the Kyoto Protocols and will vote for the "Laws of the Sea" because the UN wants independent financing for their operations. Maybe we should look at what 17,000 thousand scientists are saying about "Kyoto" because "The Laws of the Sea" is from the same bunch of rascals.
http://www.acepilots.com/unscam/
Chirac ally, war foe had oil contracts
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A longtime ally of French President Jacques Chirac and a leading British critic of the Iraq war received huge contracts to resell Iraqi oil from Saddam Hussein under the U.N. oil-for-food program, Senate investigators have found.
In findings being released today, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations charges that former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and British Member of Parliament George Galloway each received the right to market more than 10 million barrels of cut-rate oil from dictator Saddam's Oil Ministry between 1999 and 2003.
Senate investigators, who will air their findings in a hearing next week, based the new report on internal Iraqi documents, Oil Ministry correspondence and interviews with top Saddam-era officials such as detained Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan.
Subcommittee Chairman Norm Coleman, Minnesota Republican, said the findings "paint a disturbing picture of the dark underside of the oil-for-food program."
"This report exposes how Saddam Hussein turned the oil-for-food program on its head and used the program to reward his political allies like Pasqua and Galloway," he said.
Mr. Pasqua, who now serves in the French Senate, and Mr. Galloway both strenuously denied accepting bribes from Saddam after their names surfaced on a list of 270 politicians, companies and other organizations published by a Baghdad newspaper last year suspected of accepting oil allotments.
"I have said and thus I confirm that I have strictly nothing to do with this affair. I never received anything," Mr. Pasqua said last month after French police questioned one of his top aides about the oil-for-food scandal.
Mr. Galloway, one of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's more ferocious critics over the Iraq war, quit the Labor Party and won an upset victory over a Blair supporter for a seat in Parliament in the May 5 election.
The British lawmaker last year won judgments against the London Daily Telegraph and the Christian Science Monitor after they ran stories relying on forged Iraqi Foreign Ministry documents that Mr. Galloway had been paid directly by Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s.
"I have never seen a barrel of oil, never owned one, never bought one, never sold one," Mr. Galloway insisted in a 2003 interview.
But Senate investigators say they based their findings on different documents from the Iraqi Oil Ministry files and from direct testimony from Saddam aides.
Documentary evidence released by the subcommittee indicates that Mr. Pasqua received the right to buy 11 million barrels of oil from the Saddam regime between May 1999 and December 2000, often using a Swiss firm as a front.
U.S. and Iraqi investigators think Saddam used the discount allocations to buy political backing around the world as he tried to undermine U.N.-imposed sanctions.
Recipients of the allocations could immediately resell the oil to legitimate marketers at a higher price. The typical markup was 3 cents to 30 cents per barrel, making Mr. Pasqua's reported allocation worth as much $3.3 million.
Based again on Iraqi Oil Ministry documents and interviews with senior Saddam aids, the subcommittee said Mr. Galloway received allocations for 20 million barrels -- with a resale value of up to $6 million -- between June 2000 and June 2003.
The report reveals that a senior Iraqi official under Saddam told U.S. investigators last year that "Galloway used a foreign company to broker the sale of the oil allowances. The name of the company was Middle East Semiconducting Co."
The oil allocations are a prime focus of the wide-ranging investigation into the United Nations' $64 billion oil-for-food program, the biggest financial scandal in the world body's history. The U.S. Government Accountability Office last year said Saddam used bribes and oil smuggling to siphon off about $10 billion from the program before it was shut down in 2003.
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate investigation panel, said the new findings show that "the United States and other U.N. Security Council members made a fundamental mistake in allowing Saddam Hussein to award oil-for-food contracts and issue oil allocations."
http://washingtontimes.com/world/20050511-115405-2031r.htm
This should prove interesting ...
British legislator to testify in Senate
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A British lawmaker and fierce critic of the Iraq war said yesterday that he will travel to Washington next week to rebut claims by a Senate committee that he was bribed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein through the U.N. oil-for-food program.
Both British Member of Parliament George Galloway and former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua strenuously denied new charges by congressional investigators that they received cut-rate allocations of millions of barrels of Iraqi oil in return for supporting Saddam's regime.
"It doesn't matter how long you repeat a falsehood, it doesn't become other than a falsehood," Mr. Galloway told British Broadcasting Corp. Radio in an interview.
Mr. Galloway, who won a seat in Parliament earlier this month after quitting the Labor Party to protest Prime Minister Tony Blair's Iraq policy, told Sky News that the Senate charges amounted to a "political hatchet job."
In Paris, Mr. Pasqua, a longtime ally of President Jacques Chirac and another critic of international sanctions on Saddam, repeated denials that he had accepted oil bribes from Iraq. He noted that he has not held a position in the French executive branch since 1995 -- before the U.N. program began.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations said yesterday that it has evidence that Mr. Pasqua received the rights to 11 million barrels of oil and that Mr. Galloway received up to 20 million barrels from Saddam's Oil Ministry under the scandal-plagued oil-for-food program.
U.S. and U.N. investigators say the oil rights could be sold to legitimate firms at a markup of as much as 30 cents a barrel.
The charges had surfaced before, but subcommittee Chairman Norm Coleman, Minnesota Republican, said the Senate findings were based on newly uncovered Iraqi Oil Ministry documents and contracts, as well as interviews with senior Saddam aides such as detained Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan.
A spokesman for Mr. Coleman said the subcommittee would have a "witness chair and a microphone" ready for Mr. Galloway at a hearing set for Tuesday, but the aide denied the British lawmaker's assertion yesterday that he had tried to contact the Senate panel to defend himself before the report was issued.
"At no time did Mr. Galloway contact the [subcommittee] by any means, including but not limited to telephone, fax, e-mail, letter, Morse code or carrier pigeon," the spokesman said.
Comparing himself to the biblical Daniel in the lions' den, Mr. Galloway said in London he planned to "give them both barrels," when he testifies in Washington.
Mr. Blair said the British government "had no plans" to investigate the maverick lawmaker in the light of the U.S. findings, telling reporters, "Obviously, it depends on what emerges."
The French Foreign Ministry also declined direct comment on the charges against Mr. Pasqua, who recently was elected to the French Senate.
But ministry officials complained that the U.S. investigation had aired the charges without giving the accused a chance to respond, a complaint that France also lodged against a critical oil-for-food report issued by CIA weapons inspector for Iraq Charles A. Duelfer last fall.
"We have already indicated that we disapprove of this manner of proceeding," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Cecile Pozzo di Borgo told Agence France-Presse news service.
The seven-year, $64 billion U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, the largest financial scandal in the world body's history, was designed to allow Saddam to sell oil for a tightly controlled list of food and humanitarian supplies.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office last year estimated that Saddam stole as much as $10 billion under the program in secret oil deals and kickbacks, using bribes and other favors to weaken sanctions against Iraq and win political support around the world.
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20050512-111807-8265r.htm
Saddam's Business Partners
From the May 30, 2005 issue: How the Oil-for-Food scandal happened and why it matters.
by Stephen F. Hayes
05/30/2005, Volume 010, Issue 35
WHEN UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY GENERAL Kofi Annan quipped several years ago that he could "do business" with Saddam Hussein, he meant it figuratively. In light of the substantive charges coming out of the ever-expanding Oil-for-Food scandal, the throwaway line seems revealing or at least ironic.
"I think we have to take him literally," says Republican senator Norm Coleman, who is leading one of eight investigations into the corruption and mismanagement of the U.N.'s largest-ever humanitarian relief effort.
The basic outline of the scandal is simple: Saddam Hussein used the Oil-for-Food program to circumvent U.N. sanctions imposed after the Gulf war and to enrich himself and his allies. He did this by bribing leading journalists and diplomats and demanding kickbacks from those who profited from selling Iraqi oil. That he was able to do so indicates at least that the U.N. badly mismanaged the program it set up in December 1996. None of this is particularly astonishing. No one is surprised to learn that Saddam Hussein cheats, that politicians take bribes, and that the competence level of the U.N. bureaucracy is, well, suboptimal.
Nevertheless, the details of the Oil-for-Food scandal--who participated, and what they apparently did--are jaw-dropping. Vladimir Putin's chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, appears to have accepted millions of dollars in oil-soaked bribes from Saddam Hussein. The same appears to be true of the former interior minister of France, Charles Pasqua, a close friend of President Jacques Chirac. And the same appears to be true of three high-ranking U.N. executives including Benon Sevan, handpicked by Kofi Annan to administer the Oil-for-Food program. Oil-for-Food money even went to terrorist organizations supported by the Iraqi regime and, according to U.S. investigators, might be funding the insurgency today.
Through seven years' worth of deals that should never have been made, compromises that should never have been struck, and concessions that should never have been granted, Oil-for-Food strengthened Saddam Hussein. What we know about all of this now is a fraction of what will eventually be uncovered. But even this limited understanding should mean an end to Kofi Annan's term as secretary general. The sad history of U.N. incompetence on Iraq generally and in the Oil-for-Food program specifically is enough to make you wonder why George W. Bush settled for John Bolton rather than, say, John Rocker to push for reform at the world body.
AMONG THE MANY BIZARRE ASPECTS of the U.N. Oil-for-Food program is its premise: If we, the international community, allow Saddam Hussein to take in more money by selling oil, we can end the suffering of the Iraqi people even while maintaining U.N. sanctions.
Saddam Hussein argued that Iraqis were dying because the sanctions deprived him of the money to save them. And while there is little doubt that the sanctions left Iraqis much poorer than they were before the Gulf war--annual incomes dropped nearly to a third of what they had been in 1990--it was less clear that Saddam Hussein was similarly destitute.
"Saddam's family profits from covert sales of Iraqi oil and dominance of the black market, where many of the donated medicines and food end up," said then-CIA director John Deutch in public testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on September 25, 1996. "Iraqi government funds are used to maintain lavish lifestyles. Baghdad, for example, has begun working on 48 new palaces and VIP residences during the past five years, increasing the total number of estates available to Saddam Hussein to at least 78."
Iraqis were dying because Saddam Hussein was killing them. He was actively killing them, Deutch said, by executing his political opponents and by draining the marshes of central Iraq that provided sustenance to hundreds of thousands of Shiites. And he was passively killing them by refusing to cooperate with U.N. inspectors and stealing food and medicine intended to ease their suffering.
None of this mattered to France and Russia, Hussein's chief backers on the Security Council. From virtually the beginning, they wanted the sanctions to end so that they could resume their robust, pre-Gulf war business with the Iraqi government. But Hussein made their argument difficult. For the first five years after the 1991 cease-fire, he had continually violated its terms. He had failed to account for his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. He had not cooperated fully with U.N. weapons inspectors. He had smuggled oil out of his country for sale on the black market. He had harbored a fugitive from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He had attempted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush. He had amassed troops on the Kuwaiti border, threatening a new attack. And he had dispatched 40,000 Iraqi soldiers to attack the Kurds in northern Iraq.
The United States and Britain, Hussein's chief opponents on the Security Council, wanted to maintain the sanctions. But by the mid-1990s it had become clear that Hussein was winning the public relations battle. Much of the world blamed the Americans and the British for the suffering of the Iraqi people. The Clinton administration wanted a compromise.
In April 1995, as U.N. inspectors traversed Iraq looking for proscribed weapons that Saddam was to have destroyed, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed a proposal that would allow Iraq to sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months. The deal would be renewed after rigorous inspections by the Security Council to ensure that Hussein wasn't cheating. The money would go into an escrow account operated under U.N. scrutiny. Some of it would be used to compensate Kuwaiti victims of the Gulf war. Some of it would cover the cost of the U.N. weapons inspections. The bulk of the money, however, would go to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people under the U.N. sanctions. Of the $2 billion Iraq would earn from oil sales, approximately $1.3 billion would be spent on food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods. The money would be distributed from the escrow account to vendors across the globe, again with significant input from Saddam Hussein.
Iraq rejected the proposal as a violation of its sovereignty, as it had once before. The real reason was less high-minded: Hussein needed Iraqis to keep dying. He rightly interpreted as weakness the eagerness of the United States and others on the Security Council to ease the sanctions on his regime. Hussein "understood that if he exercised the option of exporting oil under the condition that only humanitarian aid could be delivered, then it would relieve the pressure on the [Security] Council to lift sanctions in their entirety," Charles Duelfer, a CIA special adviser on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, told a Senate panel last fall. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was the U.N. secretary general at the time, shrugged off Iraq's lack of cooperation with U.N. inspectors and promised Hussein that the new proposal would be a "first step toward the total lifting of the sanctions against Iraq."
When Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan on August 8, 1995, he effectively ended any hope for the total lifting of sanctions. Kamel, the nephew of Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as "Chemical Ali," was a senior regime official with responsibility for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. He revealed the elaborate schemes Hussein had put in place to hide his programs from U.N. inspectors. The Iraqi regime, not knowing what Kamel had disclosed to U.N. officials, was forced to admit a far greater level of WMD production and sophistication than had been known. The French and Russians, who had offered praise for the regime's alleged cooperation, were silenced. The drive to end sanctions was finished, or rather stalled.
Five months later, in December 1995, a U.N. agency known as the Food and Agriculture Organization produced a study that estimated 567,000 children had died as a result of the sanctions. The authors noted the seeming contradiction between the determination of U.N. humanitarian agencies to alleviate suffering and the efforts of the U.N. Security Council to enforce sanctions. The embargo, they concluded, threatened to undermine "the moral, financial, and political standing of the international community."
Another study by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) found that some 4,500 Iraqi children were dying each month from disease and starvation, and a third U.N. study, this one by the U.N. World Food Program, determined that approximately 180,000 Iraqi children under five were suffering from malnutrition. The pressure had returned.
The details of a U.N.-supervised program allowing Hussein to sell more oil in order to better provide for his people were debated for another year, with U.N. negotiators, encouraged by France and Russia, acceding to Hussein's many demands. One concession, little noticed at the time, was a provision that would allow Hussein to choose who bought and sold his oil, pending approval by the U.N. On December 10, 1996, the deal was struck.
"This is a victory for the poorest of the poor of Iraq, for the women, the children, the sick, and the disabled," said a very pleased Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The U.N. chief was not the only one who was happy. A triumphant Saddam Hussein traveled to oil-rich Kirkuk for a photo-op, where he smiled broadly as he opened a ceremonial spigot. Iraq held a nationwide celebration to mark the occasion.
Asked by a reporter about the likelihood that Hussein could circumvent or manipulate the restrictions, deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Edward Gnehm was dubious. "We designed our resolution for a cheater," he explained. "We know him. We know him well."
Looking at that formulation now--"we designed our resolution for a cheater"--Gnehm seems positively prophetic.
Whatever the intentions of its planners, the Oil-for-Food program actually worked like this: Iraq designated certain individuals or entities as potential purchasers of Iraqi oil. It gave them oil "allocations" or "vouchers" (not foreseen in the program as designed by the U.N.), which they could either use to purchase oil themselves or sell to third parties. Because the regime severely limited the number of recipients of these allocations, the recipients were able to resell the oil after attaching a surcharge--usually between 3 and 30 cents a barrel. Sales were usually a minimum of 1 million barrels, so the profits from the surcharges were significant.
Beginning in 1998, Hussein began to shift his allocations from oil companies to politicians, journalists, and terrorist groups. Mark Greenblatt, a lead investigator for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, described it this way. "His plan was simple. Rather than giving allocations to traditional oil purchasers, he gave allocations to foreign officials, journalists, even hostile terrorist entities, who then flipped their oil allocations to traditional oil companies in return for a sizable commission. In doing so, Saddam could give a foreign official or a journalist hundreds of thousands of dollars without ever paying a dime."
Officials at the highest levels of the Iraqi regime--including Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, and Oil Minister Amir Muhammad Rashid--chose the recipients.
The U.N. did not see any of this until the traditional oil companies contracted with Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization, known as SOMO. (One notable exception to this U.N. ignorance appears to have been Benon Sevan, the administrator of Oil-for-Food, who knew about the illegal allocations because he personally was receiving some. More on that later.) The Iraqis, however, kept scrupulous records of each step in their bribery scheme.
On September 1, 2000, at the direction of Saddam Hussein, SOMO began demanding a "surcharge" from each purchaser of Iraqi oil. According to the Coleman-Levin investigation, these surcharges ranged from 10 to 30 cents per barrel and were paid directly to the Iraqi regime, often through another party who, of course, took a cut. The scheme worked for two years until the United States and Britain insisted that it end. By that time, however, Hussein had made profits of nearly $230 million outside of the U.N. process, in one of several illegal mechanisms he devised to enrich himself.
Over roughly the same period, according to the Duelfer report, the Iraqi regime increased exponentially its spending on the country's Military Industrial Commission--from $7.8 million in 1998 to $500 million in 2003.
It is true that much of Iraq's illicit funding during the period of the Oil-for-Food program came from ordinary oil smuggling unrelated to the U.N. But the improvements to the oil production processes that allowed Iraq to produce and distribute oil legally also helped the illegal oil trade. The Duelfer Report estimates that Iraq's oil-smuggling profits from 1996-2003 were nearly triple those of the previous five years.
AT A SENATE HEARING LAST TUESDAY, the Coleman-Levin investigators highlighted the bribes the Iraqi regime paid to foreign officials from Britain, Russia, and France. The dramatic testimony of British member of parliament George Galloway, who unconvincingly denied knowledge of any Iraqi oil transactions, garnered most of the headlines. But Galloway is a well-known apologist for Saddam Hussein, and as a propagandist for the regime he was rather ineffective.
Two other men under investigation by the Coleman-Levin committee, however, were close advisers to the two chief opponents of the Iraq war--Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin.
One Coleman-Levin report concerns former French interior minister Charles Pasqua, who is described as a "long-time friend and political ally" of Chirac. The report says Pasqua "was a vocal supporter of restoring economic ties with the Hussein regime" as interior minister and charges him with receiving allocations for 11 million barrels of Iraqi oil. Pasqua has denied any involvement.
A second report focuses on oil allocations to the Russian Presidential Council. "Russia topped the list of nations from whom the Hussein regime wanted support at the Security Council. As a result, the Hussein regime granted allocations to Russian individuals, political parties, and others due to their good relationship with Iraq and their support for the lifting of sanctions. . . . The scale of the oil allocations given to Russian individuals and political parties was substantial, totaling approximately 30 percent of all the oil allocated during the course of the program."
Many of these allocations went to the Unity party, a predecessor of the Unified Russia party, which currently holds 37 percent of the seats in the Russian Duma. The report describes it as "a pro-Kremlin party associated with Russian president Vladimir Putin." In a prison interview last month with Senate investigators, Tariq Aziz said the Unity party was chosen for the allocations "because Russia was taking positions at the Security Council that were favorable to Iraq."
Alexander Voloshin was the head of the Russian Presidential Council and, until his resignation in 2003, the top adviser to Russian president Vladimir Putin. He has been called the Russian Karl Rove for his close relationship to Putin, and, according to the Coleman-Levin report, "there is little debate over the magnitude of Mr. Voloshin's influence in Russian government during the Oil-for-Food Program." In all, the Russian Presidential Council is alleged to have received allocations for 90 million barrels of Iraqi oil. Another well-known but less influential Russian politician, the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, also received oil allocations under Oil-for-Food, good for more than 70 million barrels.
The Coleman-Levin reports base their conclusions on a wide variety of evidence including documents from the Iraqi Oil Ministry and the State Oil Marketing Organization that record the transactions in detail. Investigators also conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iraqi officials, including Aziz and Ramadan, who supported and in many cases expanded upon the documentation.
In early June, the Coleman-Levin committee will make available a similar report on the Iraqi regime's funding of terrorist entities. They will lay out a case study of the allocations provided to the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), a terrorist group Hussein funded to conduct operations against Iran. Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit and author of Imperial Hubris, described some of the work the MEK did for Hussein in his 2002 book, Through Our Enemies' Eyes. Osama bin Laden "may have trained some fighters in Iraq at camps run by Saddam's anti-Iran force, the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK)," Scheuer writes. "The first group of bin Laden's fighters is reported to have been sent to MEK camps in June 1998; MEK cadre were also then providing technical and military training for Taliban forces and running the Taliban's anti-Iran propaganda."
THAT THE U.N. WAS APPARENTLY CLUELESS as this scheme unfolded is bad enough. What's worse, though, is that several high-ranking U.N. officials appear to have been involved in the illegality. Court documents related to the prosecution of Samir Vincent, the first American to be charged in the Oil-for-Food scandal, refer to Vincent's meetings with U.N. officials. Vincent was acting as an unregistered agent of the government of Iraq when he "and other individuals, including United Nations officials, met in Manhattan in an effort to secure terms favorable to the Government of Iraq in connection with the adoption and implementation of Resolution 986"--the resolution that created the Oil-for-Food program. Vincent is now cooperating with prosecutors.
And last month, a criminal complaint against South Korean Tongsun Park, who also acted on Hussein's behalf, mentions "U.N. Official #1" and "U.N. Official #2" as recipients of bribes from the former Iraqi regime. The two officials remain unnamed. Many news articles have pointed out that Park is a longtime friend of former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and a business associate of Maurice Strong, an adviser to Kofi Annan who currently serves as the U.N. envoy to the six-party talks on North Korea. Both men have denied any wrongdoing.
So has Kojo Annan, Kofi Annan's son. The younger Annan was consulting for the Swiss firm Cotecna while the firm was bidding to win a contract to monitor the Oil-for-Food program. Cotecna won the contract on December 31, 1998, the same day Kojo Annan's consultancy ended. Cotecna continued to pay Kojo some $2,500 per month as part of a "non-compete" clause. The payments continued until February 2004. Both Annans and Cotecna contend that Kojo's work had nothing to do with Oil-for-Food.
The same cannot be said for Benon Sevan, since he is the man Kofi Annan handpicked to run the Oil-for-Food program. According to an interim report from the Oil-for-Food investigation commissioned by the U.N. itself, Sevan "repeatedly solicited" oil allocations worth about $1 million for a company called African Middle East Petroleum. Paul Volcker, chairman of the U.N.-backed investigation, said, "The Iraqi government, in providing such allocations, certainly thought they were buying influence."
Volcker added: "Mr. Sevan placed himself in a grave and continuing conflict-of-interest situation that violated explicit U.N. rules and violated the standards of integrity essential to a high-level international civil servant."
I visited Norm Coleman in his Senate office last Wednesday. He spoke in measured terms until I asked him about Benon Sevan. "The first Volcker report concludes with a summary that this is a conflict of interest. It wasn't a conflict of interest. Sevan lied to investigators. Sevan lies. He lied to us about money that he has publicly declared. He lied to investigators. He lied about his relationship with a person who ultimately got the contract for the oil. We then get documentation that in fact Sevan lobbied for this guy to get Iraqi oil for his company. That's probable cause that he has committed a crime. And yet it was characterized as a conflict of interest?"
Coleman races through his list of grievances until that last sentence, at which point he pauses between each word. Conflict . . . of . . . interest? He shakes his head in disbelief, and then he's off again.
"That's not a conflict of interest. Sevan should be available--he shouldn't have immunity. I'm kind of on a rant here, but Sevan--up until we raised the issue, the U.N. was paying his legal fees. With Oil-for-Food money! Here's a guy who has lied to investigators--probable cause to believe he has committed a crime--and Kofi was going to pay his legal fees until we raised the issue!"
In recent weeks, the Volcker committee itself has come under scrutiny after two of its top investigators, former FBI agent Robert Parton and his deputy, Miranda Duncan, quit the probe. The Volcker committee originally explained their departures by claiming simply that the pair had finished their work. Shortly thereafter, the committee cited "personal reasons." Eventually, the truth emerged. Both Parton and Duncan believed that the Volcker committee's report on Kofi and Kojo Annan was too forgiving of the U.N. secretary general. In the days since, Parton has accused the Volcker committee of violating the confidentiality agreement it had with a witness, and that witness himself has accused the Annans of witness tampering.
Is it any wonder that Coleman wants to investigate whether Kofi Annan was--quite literally--doing business with Saddam Hussein?
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/640mcodm.asp
Roger Simon links to a thorough fisking of Gorgeous George's senate testimony.( A bit too long to post here) I wonder if any of Coleman's committee staffers will see this.
Pro-Baathist British Boor Hoisted by His Internet Petard.
If they haven't already, investigators for the Coleman Committee ought to have a look at this blog -
http://www.seixon.com/blog/archives/2005/05/with_all_due_re.html
- that is if they're interested in whether the bloviating Mr. Galloway was lying before Congress.
www.rogerlsimon.com
Cotecna E-Mail Memo Shows Connection To Kofi Annan
For months, Kofi Annan has denied any connection between the UN Oil-for-Food contractor and himself through his son Kojo. The Secretary-General has gone so far as to state that he never met with Cotecna on OFF business and only had the most general of information from his son. However, Cotecna has found an e-mail that indicates their executives did indeed meet with Kofi, making his earlier denials look more and more suspicious:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/international/14food.html?ex=1276401600&en=18e53694826162b1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
A memo written by someone who was then an executive of a major contractor in the United Nations oil-for-food program states that he briefly discussed the company's effort to win the contract in late 1998 with Secretary General Kofi Annan and his "entourage" and that the executive was told that "we could count on their support."
The secretary general's son, Kojo Annan, was employed by Cotecna Inspection Services, a Swiss contractor based in Geneva, and the nature of that relationship is among the issues being investigated by a panel appointed by the United Nations and several Congressional committees.
Kofi Annan has said several times that he did not discuss the contract with his son and was not involved in Cotecna's selection. A United Nations panel headed by Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, concluded in March that Mr. Annan had not influenced the awarding of the $10 million dollar-a-year contract to the company. ...
The memo, written on Dec. 4, 1998, by Michael R. Wilson, then a Cotecna vice president who was Kojo Annan's friend and a family friend of the secretary general, describes a meeting that took place during the 20th summit meeting of Francophone leaders in Paris in late November 1998.
"We had brief discussions with the SG and his entourage," the memo states. "Their collective advise was that we should respond as best as we could to the Q & A session of the 1-12-98 and that we could count on their support."
The "1-12-98" refers to a meeting Mr. Wilson and a delegation of Cotecna officials had in New York on Dec. 1, 1998, with senior United Nations officials who were considering which of three companies to select for the inspection contract that Cotecna won 10 days later.
The memo does not state that Kojo Annan was present at the discussion with the secretary general. But it continues with a description of "courtesy greetings" on behalf of Cotecna with presidents of several African countries held by a person identified as "KA" at the summit meeting. Asked for comment, a consultant for the company said it appeared that Mr. Wilson was referring to Kojo Annan in the memo.
The memo is attached to an e-mail message sent by Mr. Wilson to the company's owners and senior executives. It is dated Dec. 4, 1998, a week before Cotecna was informed that it had won the contract to inspect goods purchased by Iraq under the program, which allowed Iraq to sell some of its oil to meet needs of its civilian population despite United Nations sanctions.
So it appears that Kofi has not been honest with investigators to this point. No one with a brain believed his denials anyway, but this confirms that he has lied about his association with Cotecna and the role his son played in getting the Oil-For-Food contract. Kofi, Kojo, and Cotecna appear to have participated in a broad cover-up of the Secretary-General's role in ensuring his son's company controlled the Oil-for-Food program.
Now the question remains: why?
Since the SG and Cotecna took such pains to keep their meetings and arrangements hidden, it would follow that the relationship between Cotecna and the Annans had more than just coincidence as a product. My guess is that more money than just Kojo's $2500 per month is involved in this transaction and cover-up. Cotecna's records might show even more surprises in the coming weeks.
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/
Oil-for-Food Paper Shredder Still Shredding
Friday, July 15, 2005
UNITED NATIONS — The man who abruptly retired as Kofi Annan's cabinet chief after shredding papers related to the Oil-for-Food program has been shredding still more documents at the United Nations, an eyewitness told FOX News.
Iqbal Riza , who has been working on a $1-a-year salary as a special advisor to Annan, has been shredding large quantities of unknown documents in his new 10th-floor U.N. office across the street from the U.N. Secretariat building, the source said.
According to the eyewitness, a U.N. staffer who works on the same floor as Riza, the retired cabinet chief arrived within days of leaving his old job, loaded down with many cartons of papers and files.
Riza was not in his new office daily, but every day he appeared, he would put large numbers of material through an office shredder located in a public area.
"It became the office joke," said the eyewitness, who did not wish to be identified for fear of reprisals from superiors. No one knew what the documents were, the eyewitness said.
Annan's office would neither confirm nor deny the fresh round of destruction. A spokesman for the secretary-general told FOX News that Riza was now working as a special adviser on a newly launched project to foster dialogue between the Islamic and Western worlds.
"As part of his work on the Alliance of Civilizations ... he may have had to routinely destroy documents related to that project," the spokesman said.
The spokesman said that all material previously in Riza's possession related to Oil-for-Food remained in Annan's office.
Riza has not returned calls to FOX News for comment. A U.N. spokesman said he was out of the country.
Before becoming Annan's top aide, Riza was a Pakistani diplomat who had worked at the United Nations for more than 25 years.
On Dec. 22, Annan announced that Riza would be retiring from his position effective Jan. 15. Annan said he agreed to Riza's departure "with very mixed emotions," saying "he ... has always provided me with wise and trusted counsel."
One fact undisclosed at the time of Annan's announcement was that it came on the same day Riza admitted to investigators with the Independent Inquiry Committee (search) into the Oil-for-Food program that he had destroyed documents related to the program.
Two days before, when first interviewed by investigators for IIC Chairman Paul Volcker (search), he did not tell them that he approved the destruction of three years worth of documents. But when he did admit to shredding documents, he described them as being duplicates — a point the IIC would eventually dispute in a March 29 report.
"The committee does not find persuasive Mr. Riza's suggestion that his 'chron' files [chronological records] were only duplicates of files maintained elsewhere at the United Nations," the IIC report states.
Volcker's panel was commissioned by Annan to investigate the multi-billion-dollar program, which aimed to relieve Iraqi civilians from some effects of the sanctions imposed on Iraq after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
Saddam allegedly gave former government officials, activists, journalists and U.N. officials vouchers for Iraqi oil that could be resold. Investigators claim the former Iraqi regime may have illegally made more than $21 billion by cheating the program and through other sanctions-busting schemes.
Among those accused of asking Saddam's regime for vouchers worth millions is Benon Sevan, hand-picked by Annan to run the entire Oil-for-Food program.
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,162641,00.html
SLEUTHS FIND U.N. OIL $TASH
By NILES LATHEM
July 18, 2005 -- WASHINGTON — Investigators have discovered overseas bank accounts belonging to disgraced U.N. oil-for-food program head Benon Sevan that could unlock the mystery over whether he profited from dirty deals with Saddam Hussein, The Post has learned.
Sources close to the numerous probes of the giant U.N. scandal revealed that investigators have recently discovered that Sevan, who lives in New York, has accounts in Switzerland, Turkey and Cyprus — countries with notoriously tight bank secrecy laws.
Massive behind-the-scenes efforts are under way by investigative agencies to gain access to the records, according to officials with two separate agencies involved in the U.N. probe.
Sevan, who is now under suspension from the United Nations, will be the focus of one of three reports expected to be issued over the next several weeks by the Independent Inquiry Commission, headed by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker.
Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is conducting a criminal probe of Sevan's alleged dealings. At least two congressional panels are also expected to issue reports in the fall about Sevan's oil dealings.
Sevan, the former executive director of the scandal-scarred, $64 billion humanitarian aid program to Iraq, remains unable to return to the U.N. headquarters without permission, under the terms of his suspension.
Sevan, a native of Cyprus, has repeatedly denied that he took oil bribes from Saddam's regime and said he is being made a scapegoat.
In its February report, the Volcker commission discovered Iraqi Oil Ministry documents indicating that Sevan was awarded sweetheart oil deals through a Panamanian-registered company owned by a relative of ex-U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
The commission stopped short of accusing Sevan of accepting bribes, saying it had not been able to trace money from the deals between Iraq and the Panamanian company directly to him. But the Volcker panel said Sevan had more than $160,000 in "unexplained income" listed on financial-disclosure forms.
The money, he claimed, was a gift from a now-deceased Cypriot aunt, who the Volcker report said was a retired government photographer who lived on a pension and had no visible source of wealth.
Congressional sources said they are investigating whether profits from Iraqi oil deals with the Panamanian company, called Africa Middle East Petroleum, may have been laundered through Sevan's extensive family businesses and overseas bank accounts.
The Volcker panel has continued to investigate Sevan since the release of its report and could issue its latest findings as early as the end of this month, sources close to the probe said.
Sevan's lawyer, Eric Lewis, was traveling and could not be reached for comment.
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/50085.htm
Oil-for-food chief 'has overseas accounts'
By Charles Laurence in New York
(Filed: 24/07/2005)
Investigators in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal have discovered a network of overseas bank accounts operated by Benon Sevan, the former head of the United Nations programme, who is the subject of a criminal inquiry by New York prosecutors.
Officials from investigative agencies, including the UN's Volcker inquiry, say that Mr Sevan has accounts in his native Cyprus, Turkey and Switzerland.
The first interim report from the inquiry, published in February, criticised Mr Sevan for a "grave and continuing" conflict of interest over oil export vouchers from Saddam Hussein, which he solicited for an oil trading company in Panama.
The investigators, who described his conduct as "ethically improper" estimated that it had netted the company about $1.5 million.
Mr Sevan denies the allegations that he steered Iraqi oil to the trading company as part of a system of bribes and kickbacks.
The inquiry said that the origins of $160,000 received by Mr Sevan remained a mystery, although Mr Sevan said that he had been left the money by an aunt.
The investigators said that the aunt's lifestyle and modest pension were not consistent with such large sums.
The oil-for-food programme, which was designed to ease the impact of sanctions and was overseen by the UN, is believed to have allowed Saddam Hussein to make up to $10 billion (£5.46 billion) in illicit revenue.
A Volcker committee spokesman said that "new material" had been found in connection with Mr Sevan, and that his role would be a focus of the third interim report due out at the end of this month.
Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, said that he had sent a formal request to the UN for all documents relating to Mr Sevan and for the details of the foreign bank accounts.
Investigators have asked the relevant banks for details of all transactions, but because of strict laws governing banking secrecy in all three countries, have warned that they might struggle to gain access to the accounts.
Mr Sevan's lawyer in New York, Eric Lewis, was unavailable for comment yesterday.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/24/wun124.xml
Still going ...
U.N. Mystery Man: Who Is Jean-Bernard Merimee and What's His Oil-for-Food Tie?
Thursday, July 28, 2005
By Claudia Rosett
NEW YORK — As investigations proliferate into the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal, one of the more intriguing mysteries involves a former French diplomat with a direct link to the U.N.’s executive suite: Jean-Bernard Merimee .
The 68-year-old Merimee, one of several individuals now under investigation in France for alleged involvement in Saddam Hussein’s Oil-for-Food scams, is well known for his role in the early 1990s as French ambassador to the United Nations. What investigators have not so far highlighted is that during the period Merimee is alleged to have come into commercial contact with Saddam’s regime, starting in December 2001, he was working not for the French government, but as a special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Merimee’s name first surfaced in relation to Oil-for-Food early last year, with the publication in Baghdad’s Al-Mada newspaper of a long list of politicians and businessmen worldwide alleged to have received lucrative oil allocations from Saddam, which could be resold to commercial dealers for an easy profit.
His name turned up again last fall, with the release of a report by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, in an annex containing what senior U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer described as “secret lists” maintained in Baghdad by senior officials of Saddam’s regime.
On these lists, the apparent mention of Jean-Bernard Merimee, transliterated from Arabic as “Mr. Jan Mirami [French]” turned up three times, noted as having been allocated 4 million barrels of oil during the last three of the U.N. program’s 13 six-month phases — a stretch beginning Dec. 1, 2001 and truncated in March 2003 when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam.
Did Merimee even know he was on the Saddam regime’s secret list of oil beneficiaries?
According to the Duelfer report, the allocations linked to Merimee’s name were “not performed.” The Duelfer report does show the Merimee allocations linked to an oil trading company, French-based Aredio Petroleum, which also appears in the report as the alleged intermediary for a number of deals with other parties, in which oil was lifted. These include oil allocations to the Iraqi-French Friendship Society, as well as a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zurequat, sometime business partner of British parliamentarian George Galloway — whose name also appears on the Al Mada and Duelfer lists, but who has denied receiving any oil allocations from Iraq.
Nonetheless, the Merimee-Saddam connection could spell yet more trouble for Secretary-General Annan, who from 1997-2003 presided over the management of Oil-for-Food, and is already close to the scandal on several fronts.
His son, Kojo Annan, worked for a company hired in 1998 by the U.N. Secretariat to inspect Oil-for-Food imports into Iraq. Annan’s handpicked head of the Oil-for-Food program — former Under Secretary-General Benon Sevan, now a $1-per-year U.N. “adviser” — is under criminal investigation in New York state and has been censured for a “grave and continuing conflict of interest” by the U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food, which is expected to issue further findings about him shortly.
Earlier this month, another of Annan’s special advisers — Maurice Strong, who also held the senior rank of Under Secretary-General and was Annan’s personal envoy to North Korea — departed the United Nations pending clarification of his ties to Tongsun Park, a South Korean charged by the U.S. attorney with accepting millions of dollars from Saddam’s regime to lobby U.N. officials.
Now comes the French investigation into Merimee, who was hired by Annan in 1999 to work “as needed” as “Special Adviser of the Secretary-General for European issues.” Merimee served from 1991-1995 as French ambassador to the United Nations, and then as French ambassador to Italy.
Until this week, Merimee figured on the U.N. Web site’s list of “Special and Personal Representatives and Envoys of the Secretary-General,” with the rank of Under Secretary-General. Following a query this past Tuesday into Merimee’s whereabouts, the United Nations quietly removed his name from the list. Asked about the revision, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric (search) explained that Merimee has not worked for the United Nations since Feb. 14, 2002, and that his name had remained on the list for more than three years due to an “oversight.”
According to Dujarric, Merimee’s job as special adviser to Annan was to help the United Nations negotiate a framework for “the disbursement of funds” from the European Commission to the world body, leading to a deal that was signed in 2003. Presumably, that entailed no direct link to Iraq. But it did place Merimee in the sensitive spot of negotiating for the Secretary-General over arrangements for European funding for the United Nations.
Merimee was still doing that job in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, as the debate began turning hot over Iraq – a debate that ultimately polarized with Annan lining up with European heavyweights Germany and France to protest the U.S.-led coalition’s overthrow of Saddam.
In his position as Annan’s special adviser on Europe – whether Merimee knew it or not — he would have made a logical target for Saddam’s attempts to lobby both the European Union and by extension the United Nations, especially with European funding at issue. Certainly Merimee would have been a familiar figure to some of Saddam’s veteran senior diplomats.
In Merimee’s earlier incarnation as French U.N. ambassador, he did four one-month stints as chairman of the U.N. Security Council (search): in 1991, 1992 and 1994, during the early years of U.N. sanctions against Iraq, and again in May 1995, the month after the Security Council passed Resolution 986 authorizing Iraqi relief under sanctions, via oil-for-food. Merimee is on record both as insisting in 1991 that Iraq cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, and dismissing as irrelevant in 1994 a U.S. presentation of photos showing that while the Iraqi people were suffering the squeeze of sanctions, Saddam was building palaces.
What to make of all this? Repeated attempts this week to contact Merimee — or even locate him — hit a series of dead ends. Spokesmen for the French U.N. mission, the European Commission’s New York office, and the United Nations itself, all say they have no contact information for him. Calls to a phone number in Paris said to be his were not answered.
Despite the allegations, there is no proof Merimee did anything wrong. It remains a source of some mystery whether French investigators now delving into the case will divulge whether Merimee was knowingly involved in Saddam’s plans to provide him with profitable oil deals; or was the unwitting target of a failed bribery scheme; or whether the allegations about “Jan Mirami [French],” are accurate at all.
On the U.N. front, however, there is the question of why, if Merimee’s work for the organization ended on Feb. 14, 2002, there was no public announcement of his departure. And also why his name remained for another three years on the public list of those enjoying the senior status of U.N. under –secretary-general and special adviser to Kofi Annan — an “oversight” amended only after an inquiry to Annan’s office this week, following up on recent news that Merimee had become one of the targets of a French Oil-for-Food probe.
And, on a far bigger scale, there is the question of whether the U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, is planning to clarify not only the roles in the scandal of former Under Secretaries-General Maurice Strong, Benon Sevan and now Jean-Bernard Merimee, but their ties to Annan himself — and his knowledge, if any, of their alleged ties to Saddam during their U.N. service.
Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with The Foundations for the Defense of Democracies and a consultant to FOX News.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,163984,00.html
August 04, 2005
Oil-for-Food: Sevan Bribes For Sevan Covers!
Okay, put me in pun jail and never let me out... But just reading the following in the WaPo put me in a giddy mood: A U.N.-established inquiry into corruption in the $64 billion oil-for-food program will accuse the defunct program's director, Benon V. Sevan, of receiving cash kickbacks for steering lucrative Iraqi oil contracts to an Egyptian oil trader, according to Sevan's lawyer.
Former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, who is heading the independent inquiry committee, is to release a third interim report Tuesday that the lawyer, Eric L. Lewis, said in a statement will also charge Sevan, of Cyprus, with refusing to cooperate.
Progress from the Volcker Committee at last. Of course the lawyer is getting out front by saying his client is taking the heat for others (who could that be?):
Lewis said Sevan is being made a scapegoat to deflect criticism of Secretary General Kofi Annan. Lewis said that the charges, which were outlined in a confidential letter from the Volcker committee to Sevan last week, are "flatly false" and that he is going public to get his client's side of the story out before Volcker issues the report. "Mr. Sevan never took anything from anyone," he said.
If you don't count the Iraqi people.
www.rogerlsimon.com
Oil for Fraud
Paul Volcker's latest report details the graft over which Kofi Annan presided.
Tuesday, August 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Imagine an American administration in which the Attorney General secretly derives nearly half his income from the Gambino crime family. Imagine, too, that this hypothetical AG is a longstanding confidant of the President. That is what Paul Volcker's investigation of the Oil for Food Program has now demonstrated was roughly the case with Kofi Annan's United Nations.
We are referring to the publication yesterday of Mr. Volcker's latest report on Oil for Food, which focuses chiefly on the activities of Benon Sevan, formerly executive director of the U.N.'s Office of Iraq Program, and Alexander Yakovlev, a U.N. procurement officer. Although the report contains few surprises, it shows in meticulous detail how Messrs. Sevan and Yakovlev benefitted to the tune of $150,000 and $950,000 respectively from various U.N. procurement-related schemes. In doing so, it provides a vivid picture of how Mr. Annan's U.N. "works."
The accusations against Mr. Sevan are straightforward. On a visit to Baghdad in June 1998, he asked Iraq's oil minister for an allocation of 1.8 million barrels of crude oil in the name of a small Geneva-based oil-trading firm called AMEP. One of AMEP's directors, Egyptian-born Efraim Nadler, was Mr. Sevan's closest friend.
Between 1998 and 2001 AMEP was granted 7.3 million barrels of Iraqi oil, from which it netted $1.5 million in profit. Of that, nearly $600,000 was deposited in a Geneva bank account controlled by Mr. Nadler. According to Mr. Volcker's report, cash withdrawals totaling $257,000 were made during periods "when Mr. Nadler and/or Mr. Sevan were in Geneva and returning soon to New York."
It is not clear how Mr. Sevan and Mr. Nadler divided the money, but we do know that Mr. Sevan and his wife (also a U.N. employee) made cash deposits in New York banks of $147,184, and that there is "a high degree of correlation between these deposits and prior cash withdrawals from Mr. Nadler's Geneva account." The Sevans, who jointly earned $200,000 in tax-free dollars and maintained two residences, then used this money to pay off some of their chronic debt.
Mr. Yakovlev, who was recently dismissed for getting his son a job with a company that did business with the U.N., is accused by Mr. Volcker of trying to trade secret bidding information in exchange for a bribe from the French oil inspections company SGS. Mr. Volcker has turned up no information suggesting SGS paid the bribe. But Mr. Volcker did find that some $1.3 million was wired to an account controlled by Mr. Yakovlev in Antigua, $950,000 of which "came from various companies--or persons affiliated with such companies--that collectively won more than $79 million in United Nations contracts and purchase orders."
Yesterday, Mr. Yakovlev was taken into U.S. custody, where he pleaded guilty to bribery, wire fraud and money laundering charges. Mr. Sevan, however, maintains his innocence, and has written Mr. Annan to say "the charges are false, and you, who have known me all these years, should know that they are false." What Mr. Annan knows will be the subject of Mr. Volcker's next report, due in September. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see whether the Secretary General honors his pledge to lift Mr. Sevan's diplomatic immunity if and when he is indicted.
What is clear is that the Secretary General intends to spin the Volcker report not as an indictment of his tenure in office, but--and this is amazing--as another reason to endorse his reform agenda and, therefore, his continuance in office. "As part of its investigation of Mr. Yakovlev," a U.N. press release states, the U.N. "will separately make recommendations for further reforms, particularly regarding strengthened supervision and controls over individual procurement officers."
Mr. Sevan's graft is reprehensible, but the real scandal is that Saddam Hussein was able to manipulate the Oil for Food program and bend the U.N. to his will for such comparatively tiny sums. That didn't happen because of U.N. oversight failures; it happened because of the U.N.'s political commitment to continued dealings with Saddam, something Mr. Annan endorsed personally, both through his own diplomatic initiatives and his stalwart defense of the prewar status quo.
Even now, the U.N.'s defenders like to paint Oil for Food as a great humanitarian effort slightly tarnished by a few overhyped instances of corruption. In fact, Oil for Food was a huge field of graft, helped by the fact that the man in charge of policing it was, based on the evidence Mr. Volcker has collected, in the service of the bad guys. Mr. Annan might think of this as yet another opportunity for "reform." If he's even remotely serious on that score, he can begin by reflecting a little harder on his own responsibility for the failures over which he, and nobody else, presided.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007079
experiencediz
08-10-2005, 12:37 AM
Annan said to have stayed out of Iraq contract bid
Tue Aug 9, 2005 10:55 PM ET
By Evelyn Leopold
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A key investigator of the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq said on Tuesday there was "absolutely" no evidence that Secretary-General Kofi Annan had interfered in the awarding of a contract to a firm that employed his son.
But South African Judge Richard Goldstone said the inquiry was still investigating "vigorously" whether Annan had advance knowledge of the bid by the Swiss firm Cotecna Inspection S.A., which was awarded a lucrative contract in the humanitarian program for Iraq.
"We found absolutely no evidence implicating the secretary-general, Mr. Annan, in the award of the Cotecna contract," Goldstone said on the BBC program "Hardtalk."
"That was handled by the appropriate organs within the United Nations. And there is absolutely not a tittle of evidence suggesting he tried to influence that decision."
Goldstone's comments amounted to a stronger defense of the secretary-general than previous reports by the probe, which found "the evidence was not reasonably sufficient" to show Annan played a role in the bidding process.
Goldstone is one of three commissioners leading the U.N.-established Independent Inquiry Committee, along with Paul Volcker, the former head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and Mark Pieth, a Swiss professor and money laundering expert.
Annan's role will be analyzed further in a comprehensive report due in September, shortly before the secretary-general hosts a summit on U.N. reforms with more than 170 world leaders.
At issue now is an e-mail from Michael Wilson, a former vice-president of Cotecna, who said he met the secretary-general shortly before the contract was awarded, along with Annan's son Kojo. Wilson claimed he discussed Cotecna's negotiations with the United Nations and concluded the firm could "count on their support."
"It does throw new light on the question of the secretary-general's knowledge and that is being very vigorously investigated," said Goldstone. "The e-mail appears to be authentic. Whether its contents are correct are another matter."
Goldstone said in an earlier interview with Reuters that Kojo Annan, who was being paid as a consultant to Cotecna after he left a full-time job, was cooperating with the investigation, although he had not done so at first.
"There was a period when he refused to speak to us but he has been more cooperative," Goldstone said of the younger Annan, son of secretary-general's first wife, a Nigerian.
Kojo Annan was being interviewed in Europe, Goldstone said,
The inquiry, headed by Volcker, released an explosive report on Monday that cited Benon Sevan, the head of the $64 billion oil-for-food humanitarian program for getting kickbacks amounting to nearly $150,000. It also accused a procurement official, Alexander Yakovlev, of accepting bribes on contracts, outside of the program of about $1 million.
Sevan has denied the accusations while Yakovlev has admitted them to federal prosecutors and is out on bail.
Annan said to have stayed out of Iraq contract bid (http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-08-10T025531Z_01_N09455636_RTRIDST_0_INTERNATIONAL-IRAQ-PROBE-ANNAN-DC.XML)
What did the Secretary General know ... and when did he know it?
apologies to Former Sen. Howard Henry Baker
Oil-for-Food: Suspicions are hurting U.N.'s credibility
10:05 PM CDT on Tuesday, August 9, 2005
Kofi Annan says he's not hiding anything, but a controversial e-mail has investigators wisely taking another look at the U.N. secretary-general's possible involvement in the oil-for-food scandal.
Mr. Annan and his son Kojo have long denied rumors linking them to corruption in a program that allowed Saddam Hussein's dictatorship to sell oil and misuse cash earmarked for humanitarian aid. In a report earlier this year, independent investigators led by former Federal Reserve chief Paul Volcker said they had no conclusive evidence that Mr. Annan knew that Cotecna, his son's employer, was a bidder on a program contract or whether the younger Annan influenced the contract.
But a follow-up report released Monday raises new questions. In addition to accusing top former U.N. executives Benon Sevan and Alexander Yakovlev of corruption, this investigation disclosed an e-mail that suggests a Cotecna vice president and friend of the Annans had "brief discussions" with the secretary-general in late November 1998 about the status of Cotecna's negotiations. The executive, Michael Wilson, has denied authorship, but investigators say the e-mail appears to be authentic.
Mr. Annan and his son haven't spoken directly on this matter. In an attempt to deflect criticism, a spokesman for Mr. Annan said Monday that top executives aren't always aware of corruption and conflicts of interest in the middle levels of their organization. He also said the secretary-general remains committed to reforming the U.N.
As investigators concede, this probe needs to go deeper than Mr. Sevan, the program's former administrator, who is accused of receiving illegal kickbacks, and Mr. Yakovlev, a former U.N. procurement officer who pleaded guilty Monday to bribery, wire fraud and money-laundering charges.
The United Nations has massive credibility and management issues, problems made worse by the suspicions that dog Mr. Annan and growing evidence of Saddam Hussein's wholesale manipulation of the U.N.
The inquiry panel's next report, which investigators say will focus on Mr. Annan's activities, must outline his role in unfettered detail. Unless it does, serious overdue reform of U.N. leadership, conduct and policies is a pipe dream.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/081005dnedioil.11dda8e3.html
Is it too soon to nominate Vaclav Havel for Secretary General?
The family business ...
Annan’s brother in oil scandal inquiry
Robert Winnett
THE official investigation into corruption in the £20 billion United Nations oil for food programme is now looking at the brother of Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general.
Kobina Annan, the Ghanaian ambassador to Morocco, is said by investigators to be “connected” to an African businessman at the centre of the scandal.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1734483,00.html
Vaclav Havel for UNSG
Yakolev must be singing ...
KOFI ORDERS PROBE OF GRAFT CONTRACTS
By NILES LATHEM
August 16, 2005 -- WASHINGTON — U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan ordered a massive investigation of the entire U.N. procurement division yesterday amid growing concerns about corruption and irregularities in the awarding of U.N. contracts.
In yet another major organizational shake-up in response to the Iraq oil-for-food scandal, the embattled Annan placed the procurement office under the authority of U.N. Controller Warren Sachs, pending the outcome of a probe into the agency, which awards contracts worth billions of dollars.
The United Nations said in a statement that Annan ordered the probe "due to the seriousness of the situation" raised by last week's announcement that former U.N. procurement officer Alexander Yakovlev pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to taking bribes from companies seeking U.N. business.
Yakovlev, a 52-year-old Russian who lives in Yonkers, is expected to cooperate with federal prosecutors who are seeking information about U.N. corruption that goes beyond the scandal-scarred oil-for-food program, sources said.
In return for spilling the beans on more U.N. bureaucrats, Yakovlev, who resigned and is now without diplomatic immunity, is expected to receive a reduced sentence. He also is applying for U.S. citizenship.
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/51925.htm
And in a shocker ...
Oil for Enron
By CLAUDIA ROSETT
August 18, 2005; Page A10
Since the Oil for Food program came to an end in 2003, it has been described -- accurately enough -- as oil for palaces, oil for terror and oil for fraud. Now it turns out the U.N. relief program in Iraq was also oil for Enron.
Among the great scams of our time, there's a near-poetic inevitability to the convergence of the twain. When I first wrote about Oil for Food on these pages, almost three years ago, the analogy that came instantly to mind was Enron. Lo! Much scandal and many questions later, investigators for Rep. Henry Hyde's International Relations Committee have unearthed documents showing that shortly before Enron imploded in late 2001, the company, among its other deals, was shelling out millions, some of it into Swiss bank accounts, to buy Iraqi crude exported by Saddam under Oil for Food.
Not that Enron did business directly with Saddam's regime in violation of U.N. sanctions, or even did anything clearly illegal. Rather, the tale of its guest appearance in Oil for Food illustrates why in some ways the U.N. scandal dwarfs even Enron. Under cover of Oil for Food, Saddam's system of bribes, payoffs and kickbacks, ultimately totaling billions, ran through chains of often obscure middlemen in places such as Cyprus and Switzerland. Enron shows up on one of the outer spokes of Oil for Food's global web, dealing with a trans-Atlantic crew of companies and characters engaged not only in fraud, but allegedly linked to arms traffic, payoffs to the Kremlin and kickbacks to Saddam's regime. Along the way, this gang did its bit to comply via Oil for Food shipments with Saddam's policy of enforcing the Arab League boycott against Israel.
One of the most telling documents the Hyde committee investigators have come across is a fax addressed to Enron Reserve Acquisition Corp., dated March 27, 2001, and accompanied by U.N. approval papers needed to clear through U.S. customs two shipments of Iraqi oil, worth millions. Named on this fax are three companies that have in recent times become infamous on the Oil for Food investigations circuit: Russia-based Rosnefteimpex; Italy-based Italtech; and Bahamas-based Bayoil Supply and Trading Ltd., owned by a U.S. citizen, David Chalmers, who was also the sole shareholder of a Texas-based company, Bayoil (USA). The arrangement outlined in the fax shows that despite a mandate to minimize middlemen, U.N. Oil for Food officials had approved the sale of oil by Saddam's regime to Rosnefteimpex and Italtech. These companies in turn had sold their oil allocations to Bayoil, which was busy in this instance completing one of several onward sales to Enron.
Larded into such deals were rich opportunities for corruption. Under Oil for Food, U.N. officials set the price for Iraq's oil artificially low, and the U.N. let Saddam pick the oil buyers. From this mix flowed the scams in which Saddam's chosen dealers made fat profits, which effectively translated into payoffs. Out of these, some of the buyers paid kickbacks to Saddam's regime.
Rosnefteimpex was accused in May by Senate investigators of having served as a conduit for Saddam to send payoffs to members of the Russian Presidential Council, which advises Vladimir Putin. Russian officials have denied this. Italtech was run by a Chilean-Italian, Augusto Giangrandi, whose history included procuring cluster bombs for Saddam's regime in the 1980s. During the Oil for Food era, Mr. Giangrandi's connections in Baghdad were good enough that Italtech ranked among the top 20 out of the more than 160 select buyers of Saddam's oil under the program, clocking up $846 million in purchases. Mr. Giangrandi had as a business partner the owner of Bayoil, Mr. Chalmers, who also did business with Saddam's regime via Oil for Food. In April, Mr. Chalmers, along with his Bayoil companies in both Texas and the Bahamas, was indicted by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for "Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud and Engage in Prohibited Financial Transactions with Iraq." He has pleaded not guilty.
The trio of Rosnefteimpex (with its alleged kickback links to the Kremlin), Italtech (with its niche in Baghdad and history in the weapons trade) and Bayoil (later indicted for fraud and sanctions busting) were a conduit for the sale in 2001 of Iraqi oil into the U.S. And about the time Mr. Chalmers was peddling some of this oil to Enron, he was also -- according to the federal indictment -- paying kickbacks, via a "foreign company," to Saddam's regime. These kickbacks allegedly went to an Oil for Food contractor, Al Wasel & Babel, based in Dubai, which was designated last year by the U.S. Treasury as a front company for Saddam's regime. Al Wasel & Babel, along with handling hundreds of millions worth of Oil for Food relief sales in which the regime basically did business with itself, also tried to procure a surface-to-air missile system -- which could have been used to target U.S. and British planes patrolling the no-fly zones over Iraq.
Layered into this scene is collaboration by Bayoil with Saddam in treating democratic Israel as a pariah state. Mr. Hyde's investigators have discovered a letter, signed by Mr. Giangrandi on Sept. 9, 1999 -- and duly notarized -- which appears to be a document solicited by Saddam's regime as part of the deal for lucrative rights to buy underpriced oil via the U.N. program. "For and on behalf of Bayoil," wrote Mr. Giangrandi. "We herewith confirm never to have sold directly or indirectly to Israel and further confirm that this policy will remain permanently in force during the entire validity of our contract." A fax out of Houston from one of Mr. Chalmers's associates now under indictment, a Bulgarian, Ludmil Dionissiev, stipulates in reference to a 1998 shipment of Iraqi oil that the vessel used "had never traded in Israel."
Overseeing all this was a U.N. where the former head of Oil for Food, Benon Sevan, was evidently on the take from Saddam, and where investigators are still exploring a growing list of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's family and crony business connections to the program. And among those waiting to buy the Kirkuk crude and Basrah light thus filtered in the name of humanitarian aid out of Saddam's Iraq was -- could anyone make this stuff up? -- Enron.
Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112433247085116385,00.html?mod=opinion%5Fmain %5Fcommentaries
U.N.-TOUCHABLE: LUCKY SEVAN MAY BE HOME FREE
By NILES LATHEM
August 23, 2005 -- WASHINGTON — The lawyer for the disgraced former head of the U.N. oil-for-food program hinted yesterday his client may have left the United States. for good — deepening suspicion among investigators that Benon Sevan fled to avoid prosecution.
In a statement e-mailed to The Post, Eric Lewis said his client has returned to Cyprus "for a religious rite on his aunt's death."
"As he is now retired from the U.N., Cyprus is his place of residence and not New York," Lewis said.
An independent commission has accused Sevan of accepting oil bribes from Saddam Hussein, and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is pursuing criminal charges.
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/52371.htm
The U.N.'s Spreading Bribery Scandal: Russian Ties and Global Reach
By Claudia Rosett, George Russell
FoxNews.com
September 6, 2005
l
The U.N.'s Spreading Bribery Scandal: Russian Ties and Global Reach How widespread is the corruption at the United Nations? The multibillion-dollar Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal was just the beginning.
Now the issue is becoming the scale of corruption in the U.N.'s normal operations — and which individuals and corporations are reaping the benefits of a network of bribery and conspiracy that investigators have just begun to uncover. So far, those identities are still a mystery — but perhaps not for much longer.
Last Friday, federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted the head of the U.N.'s own budget oversight committee, a Russian named Vladimir Kuznetsov, on charges of laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bribes paid by companies seeking contracts with the United Nations.
Kuznetsov, who has pleaded innocent, allegedly took a cut so openly that he had part of it deposited into the United Nations' own staff credit union in New York.
Kuznetsov's arrest is the latest twist in the scandal involving the U.N. procurement department, which was the longtime post of Alexander Yakovlev , another Russian U.N. official recently fingered by U.S. federal investigators.
On Aug. 8, Yakovlev pleaded guilty to federal charges of corruption, wire fraud and money laundering, after a FOX News investigation revealed his unauthorized ties with a U.N. contractor, IHC Services, and details leading to his secret offshore bank account. Federal investigators have now alleged that from 2000 on, Yakovlev did at least some of his grafting in partnership with Kuznetsov, transferring bribe money to him via the Antigua Overseas Bank in the West Indies. Allegedly the bribe money was obtained in exchange for providing inside information to companies seeking U.N. contracts.
The Yakovlev-Kuznetsov scandal joins a growing list of cases of U.N. misconduct, waste, theft and abuse. They include bribe-taking under Oil-for-Food, sexual abuse of minors by peacekeepers in West Africa, sexual and financial misconduct — including outright larceny — at U.N. offices in Geneva, and business ties between the son of Secretary-General Kofi Annan and one of the Oil-for-Food inspection firms hired with Yakovlev's input, Swiss-based Cotecna Inspection (Cotecna has denied any wrongdoing).
In yet another scandal that emerged just last week, the United Nations disclosed that its Ukrainian peacekeeping contingent in Lebanon, including the commanding officer, has engaged in "significant financial misconduct" — though the world body has refused to provide details of what was done wrong or how much money was involved.
Amid all this, the U.N. procurement scandal at headquarters stands out as especially important, because the graft is not confined to any one program, but radiates from the United Nations' administrative core. Kuznetsov held an influential post in which he passed judgment on line items in the U.N. budget. Yakovlev, who held various portfolios in procurement during his 20-year career, dealt with contractors operating in places as far-flung as Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He even managed the architectural contract for the U.N.'s proposed $1.2 billion renovation of its Manhattan headquarters.
While there is no proof that in every case Yakovlev solicited bribes, there is by now enough evidence to invite investigation into all contracts he dealt with. Secretary-General Annan has ordered a review of the procurement department and put the organization's new controller in charge, but has not lifted the secrecy behind which Yakovlev operated in the first place. The investigation, according to a U.N. spokesman, is "ongoing."
The amounts at issue in this alleged Russian bribery ring are quite likely far larger than the "several hundreds of thousands" so far cited by federal investigators. The most recent report from Paul Volcker's Oil-for-Food investigation dwelled at length on Yakovlev's failed attempt in 1996 to solicit a bribe related to an Oil-for-Food contract. But Volcker also noted in passing that Yakovlev had received more than $950,000 in bribes from companies that "collectively won more than $79 million in United Nations contracts and purchase orders."
Volcker did not elaborate, presumably because the graft involved U.N. activities outside his Oil-for-Food mandate. But the hundreds of thousands that according to federal investigators allegedly passed from Yakovlev to Kuznetsov via secret bank accounts in the West Indies hint at a pie even bigger than $79 million.
(The Volcker committee is slated to deliver its main report on Oil-for-Food on Wednesday.
Procurement and budgeting corruption may escape Volcker's scrutiny, but they are central to the mandate of Annan.
This scandal touches on almost everything the secretary-general is supposed to control. It is by way of procurement contracts, for goods and services ranging from cappuccino and paper clips at U.N. headquarters, to air freight services and food rations for peacekeeping troops worldwide, that the United Nations spends the billions contributed every year by member states — of which U.S. taxpayers provide the largest slice.
So which contractors paid the six-figure bribes mentioned by federal prosecutors and by Volcker? And what did they get in return? In almost all cases, the United Nations keeps secret most details of its procurement contracts, including which procurement officials handled specific deals. The international organization still refuses to disclose the names of all the firms Yakovlev dealt with.
U.S. federal investigators, who are clearly not done with their own probe, have lifted the curtain only a little further.
So far U.S. authorities have cited four unnamed "foreign firms" in connection with the Yakovlev-Kuznetsov case, and provided only a bare description of their activities. One firm is described in the federal summaries as involved in "the airlifting of United Nations supplies to foreign countries." Two more were described in Yakovlev's guilty plea as firms helping additional firms get U.N. contracts — companies known in U.N. parlance as "vendor intermediaries" — which strongly implies that yet more companies are involved.
In a June 20 report, FOX News uncovered close personal links between Yakovlev and one "vendor intermediary." That report led to his resignation from the United Nations, and his subsequent arrest. The firm identified by FOX News is IHC Services, a company with offices in New York and Milan, Italy, that in 1999 supplied nearly $2 million worth of portable generating sets to U.N. peacekeepers and, according to its CEO, Ezio Testa, has helped a wide variety of suppliers obtain other U.N. contracts.
A report issued last month by Paul Volcker's U.N.-authorized probe into Oil-for-Food provides clear clues to the identity of yet another U.N. contractor that dealt intensively with Yakovlev though nothing in the report suggests any impropriety in the contractor's U.N. dealings.
The report includes in its back pages a heavily redacted copy of a letter to Yakovlev from an unknown correspondent, dated May 4, 2005, and a memo from Yakovlev dated June 6, 2005. These documents include scribbled annotations by Yakovlev and were apparently released by Volcker solely as part of a set of handwriting samples. All personal and corporate names except Yakovlev's were blacked out by the investigators.
Even so, the documents provide more information than perhaps Volcker intended. The letter discusses food services costs for U.N. peacekeeping missions in Liberia, Eritrea and Burundi, and refers to pricing and delivery amendments to the supply contracts. The memo includes references in Yakovlev's handwriting to peacekeeping operations in Lebanon, Cyprus, Western Sahara and the Golan Heights.
More ...http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,168591,00.html
September 06, 2005
Nervous Time at the UN
In her run-up to Wednesday's Volcker Committee mega-report on oil-for-food -- Exposé, At Last? -- Claudia Rosett is skeptical that the investigation will prove anything more than a grandiloquent whitewash. It's hard to argue with her - and I won't (not that I would even want to). She certainly has the early evidence (the report preface) on her side, not to mention the attitude of Kofi's recent interview with his friends at the BBC. Claudia describes that event this way:
In a BBC interview released this week, Annan expressed regret that the U.N. ever engaged in administering relief for Saddam Hussein's Iraq. "Honestly, I wish we were never given that program, and I wish the UN will never be asked to undertake that kind of program again."
Annan seems to have forgotten his own role in urging from 1997 on that Oil-for-Food become not cleaner, but bigger and ever more directly managed by his own secretariat. It was Annan who picked as head of the program his longtime colleague Benon Sevan, the U.N. lifer who Volcker has already charged with taking bribes from Saddam. It was Annan who stocked his list of special advisers with two men now embroiled in Oil-for-Food investigations, former French ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee and Canadian tycoon Maurice Strong.
Nor does Annan even now seem to have learned the real lessons of the Oil-for-Food trainwreck. The same BBC interview brought us Annan pushing his pet proposal that the rich nations of the world give an automatic 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product for aid, much of it presumably to be funneled through the United Nations. Such amounts would run into the hundreds of billions, dwarfing even Oil-for-Food, and through the same fingers that Annan piously assures the BBC he wishes would never touch such lucre again. And like Oil-for-Food, which drew its funding straight from Saddam's oil revenues, this plan for relief would generate vast sums without any need for the U.N. to justify why it needs every dollar - which is once again, a recipe for corruption.
After all the scandal, all the investigating by Volcker, and all the passionate words about reform, the likely product of this report is Volcker chastising but excusing Annan, and Annan excusing himself, on grounds - as he told the BBC this week - that "I don’t think any institution can go through the scrutiny, the scrubbing we’ve gone through and come out squeaky clean."
Ah, treachery! as the late Ross Thomas would say. Claudia's cynicism certainly seems justified.
But wait. Ironically, the AP, of all places, appears to be taking the whole thing more seriously. Maybe this report will have some teeth. Their Nick Wadhams summarizes:
The preface of the report makes four broad recommendations:
_Create the position of a chief executive officer, to ensure hiring decisions are based on talent rather than "political convenience."
_Establish an Independent Auditing Board to fully review U.N. programs and hiring.
_Seek more effective coordination between U.N. agencies.
_Make sure the U.N. Security Council is clearer about the purpose and criteria for U.N. operations that it authorizes.
Sounds good at first glance, doesn't it? But something rather obvious is missing, something even rudimentary intelligence would tell us is the sine qua non for battling and ending corruption - simple economic transparency... permanently opening the UN's books for the citizens of the world who pay for it.
It's not there.
Oh, well.
www.rogerlsimon.com
Diplomatic skills fail to cover up sins of omission
By Bronwen Maddox
THE United Nations would be better off without Kofi Annan.
That seems an inevitable conclusion from reading the latest, most comprehensive report and most damning report into the corruption of the oil-for-food programme.
The report, by Paul Volcker, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, undermines the Secretary-General’s claim to either diplomatic or administrative competence. Before next week’s highly charged summit in New York, the UN’s 60th anniversary, it greatly weakens his position.
The report says that Annan’s sins were those of omission not commission. It finds no “smoking gun”.
It does not say that he was guilty of steering contracts towards a company employing his son, Kojo.
But the omissions were enormous, allowing Saddam Hussein to manipulate the programme to try to buy influence, including influence with senior UN officials.
The oil-for-food programme was supposed to shield Iraqis from the worst effects of sanctions. It was at least partly successful in doing that, Volcker says, providing minimal standards of nutrition and healthcare.
But at no point did the UN handle it in a manner capable of heading off trouble. Nor, when “clear evidence” of corruption and waste emerged, did it do much about the problem. The reports most damaging criticisms are:
# A “grievous absence” of effective auditing
# “Instances of corruption” among senior staff as well as in the field. “Serious instances of illicit, unethical and corrupt behaviour”
# “Egregious lapses, that allowed corruption and incompetence to cripple the operation”
# Annan’s failure energetically to investigate criticism of his son’s employers’ role
The conclusion, it said, was “unambiguous”. The UN urgently needed “stronger executive leadership, thorough- going administrative reform and more reliable controls and auditing”.
In defence of Annan, it could be said that the report’s most severe criticisms of all are reserved for private companies that took part in the corruption. It will release a list next month.
It also blames member states and the Security Council, who devised the programme. In particular, it blames the five permanent members of the Council — Britain, the United States, France, Russia and China — for looking the other way.
It blames Annan’s predecessor Boutros Boutros-Ghali for setting up the programme in a way that enabled Saddam to exploit it.
The report says of Annan that the Secretary-General had come to be viewed as chief diplomatic and political agent of the UN. His responsibilities tend to be all-consuming.
It offers this by way of acknowledgement of the pressures on Annan, it seems. But this is a poor excuse.
Annan was chosen more for his diplomatic skills than his administrative gifts, it is fair to say. As Volcker puts it, he was “widely respected for precisely those qualities”. But it is hard to say that he has distinguished himself in that realm as much as his supporters hoped.
He has presided over one of the worst rows within the Security Council in the UN’s history, in the runup to Iraq. The rift with the US has grown steadily worse.
True, some of the reforms the Volcker report calls for are ones that Annan himself has backed.
But his attempt to reform the UN internally, while generating huge debate, has yet to get decisive support.
And if he doesn’t score highly on the diplomatic front, the Volcker report damns his control of administration.
Sixty years after its creation, the UN urgently needs better leadership than that.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1770389,00.html#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=World
Oil for Food as Usual
The U.N.'s worst critics couldn't invent what the Volcker report shows.
Friday, September 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
"The scandal, quote, unquote, is, in my view, nonsense." Thus did Denis Halliday, a former United Nations Assistant Secretary General, opine in November 2004 on the U.N.'s Oil for Food program. With the release Wednesday of Paul Volcker's fourth report on Oil for Food, we have the clearest account yet of what this quote-unquote scandal is really about.
Let's begin with what this scandal is not about, at least not fundamentally. It is not about the dubious business practices of the Swiss Inspections company Cotecna, which was improperly awarded a multimillion-dollar Oil for Food contract while employing Secretary-General Kofi Annan's son Kojo, although this taught us something about the nepotism that typifies U.N. dealings. Nor is it about Kofi Annan's personal probity, which had been called into question by evidence that he was aware of, and tried to influence, the Cotecna bid. Mr. Volcker has found no conclusive proof on this score.
In other words, Oil for Food is not about some isolated incidents of perceived or actual wrongdoing during the course of a seven-year effort to maintain sanctions on Iraq, monitor its oil flows and feed its people. Oil for Food is a story about what the U.N. is. And our conclusion from reading the 847-page report is that the U.N. is Oil for Food.
To better understand the scandal, it helps to distinguish its political and managerial components. Responsibility for administering the program fell primarily to the U.N. Secretariat, which established the Office of Iraq Program (OIP) under the direction of Benon Sevan.
But the program itself was designed by members of the U.N. Security Council following protracted negotiations with the government of Saddam Hussein. It was the Security Council, for example, that approved Saddam's right to choose the companies, contractors and middlemen with whom Iraq would do business, and through which the entire program was corrupted. The Security Council also ran its own supervisory "661 Committee," named after the 1990 Security Council resolution that imposed sanctions on Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait.
The result of this bifurcated structure was that real responsibility for overseeing Oil for Food fell between two stools--and into the lap of Mr. Sevan and his staff. Mr. Volcker's previous reports tell us that Mr. Sevan was in the pay of the Iraqi government.
The current report adds to our knowledge of what the Iraqis got for their money. For example, Mr. Sevan and his staff failed to inform the Secretariat and the 661 Committee of the extent of Iraq's various kickback schemes--involving as many as 2,500 companies--and dismissed media reports about them as "groundless allegations, provocative suggestions and factual mistakes." Mr. Sevan also fought tooth-and-nail the Bush Administration's successful attempt to impose retroactive pricing standards on the sale of Iraqi oil, which helped curb some of Saddam's abuses.
However, part of the reason Mr. Sevan was able to get away with his malfeasance was that neither the Secretariat nor the 661 Committee showed any appetite to exercise their fiduciary obligations. Mr. Annan testified to the Committee that Mr. Sevan worked directly for the 661 Committee. Yet as the report acidly notes, "the difficulty with the Secretary-General's view is that he appointed Mr. Sevan and he created OIP in the first place." Maybe former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay should call Mr. Annan to testify as an expert witness at his trial.
This is an excerpt from the latest report of Paul Volcker's Independent Inquiry Committee on the United Nations' Oil for Food program. Benon Sevan, the former director of the Office of Iraq Program (OIP) that oversaw Oil for Food, has been accused by the Committee of taking nearly $150,000 in bribes from Iraq. "The 38th Floor" refers to Secretary General Kofi Annan's offices at U.N. headquarters. The "661 Committee" was a U.N. Security Council body, outside of Mr. Annan's Secretariat, which helped oversee the Oil for Food program.
"When interviewed by the Committee, the Secretary General, the Deputy Secretary-General [Louise Frechette] and [Chief of Staff Iqbal] Riza each struggled to rationalize the role of the 38th Floor in overseeing OIP. Instead, they offered conflicting views of their own responsibilities as well the functions of Mr. Sevan vis-a-vis the program. These inconsistencies demonstrate a basic confusion within the highest offices of the Secretariat. . . .
"When interviewed by the Committee, the Secretary General insisted that the program was "a very transparent operation"-"one of the most transparent programs [he has] seen" in terms of the process it required for reports to be made by the Secretariat to the Security Council. However, significant information was routinely withheld from the 661 Committee. Despite mounting evidence of a widespread kickback scheme, the Secretary General's quarterly reports never mentioned the emerging problem. . . .
"To be sure, the Secretary General and Deputy Secretary General were apparently not aware of the full scope of evidence that OIP had accumulated and, clearly, Mr. Sevan bears responsibility for withholding information. . . . But the Secretary-General and Deputy Secretary-General (and Mr. Riza) were aware of the kickback scheme at least as early as February 2001. The Secretary General discussed the kickback allegations and other sanctions violations with Mr. Sevan on numerous occasions. . . .
"In the final analysis, Mr. Sevan ran a $100 billion program with very little oversight from the supervisory authority that created his position and OIP. Through a combination of an unclear reporting structure, a lack of supervision by the 38th Floor, and a general unwillingness to recognize and address significant issues on the part of the Secretary General and Deputy Secretary General, Mr. Sevan had substantial autonomy to shape the program's direction. He failed to resist and challenge the Iraqi regime's rampant sanctions violations through which the regime diverted billions of dollars away from the humanitarian effort."
Mr. Annan is also on record telling the Committee he viewed Oil for Food as "a very transparent operation." Yet as the report shows, Mr. Annan was himself complicit in covering up Iraqi violations of the sanctions regime. Specifically, Mr. Annan was aware of the kickback issue from at least February 2001, yet "the Secretary General's quarterly reports never mentioned the emerging problem." (See the report excerpt nearby.)
Why Mr. Annan chose to see no evil on Iraqi sanctions violations, much less use his bully pulpit to denounce it (as he later denounced the Iraq war as "illegal"), is an interesting question. Our sense is that the U.N. Secretariat as a whole took the view that the sanctions regime was immoral and that Saddam was within his rights to break free of it.
Whatever the case, the Secretariat had a more than willing partner in the 661 Committee, and for reasons that are more easily comprehended. Iraq regularly steered contracts to Security Council members it believed were friendly to its political interests. Russian companies, for instance, did $19 billion in oil deals with Iraq, and French companies sold Saddam $3 billion in humanitarian assistance (much of which, the report notes, was diverted for Iraqi military purposes).
It's no coincidence, comrade, that France and Russia, as well as China (which did its own thriving business with Saddam) consistently downplayed the kickback allegations and pushed to have the sanctions regime eased. Only the U.S. and Britain made any effort to monitor Oil for Food for fraud, although even these efforts were lackluster until the Bush Administration came to office. We should also note the U.S. was itself guilty of looking the other way when it came to Iraq's oil smuggling through allies Jordan and Turkey.
So it was that the largest fraud ever recorded in history came about. Press reports often cite the overall size of Oil for Food at $60 billion, but Mr. Volcker's report makes clear that the real figure was in excess of $100 billion. From this, Saddam was able to derive $10.2 billion from illicit transactions. But the important point is that he was able to steer 10 times that sum toward his preferred clients in the service of his political aims.
None of this happened by accident. Mr. Volcker's report is replete with examples of incompetent U.N. oversight and tales of political wrangling among the permanent members of the Security Council. But the abiding fact is that it was the Western powers, not Saddam, who wanted Oil for Food at virtually any cost, because it offered the appearance of a meaningful policy in the absence of a real one, namely regime change. And it was the political convenience of this chimera that led the U.S. and the U.K. to tolerate, and the rest of the Security Council to feast on, the opportunities for corruption that were inscribed in the very nature of the program.
As for the U.N., it proved its worth to Saddam as the one hall of mirrors in which such shenanigans could take place. Yet even now we are told that "at least" Oil for Food fed the Iraqi people when they were on the edge of starvation, and this is accounted a U.N. success. That is false. Oil for Food offered a lifeline of cash and influence to a regime that was starving its people. The program did not corrupt the U.N. so much as exploit its essential nature. Now Mr. Annan wants to use this report as an endorsement of his "reform" proposals. Only at the U.N. could he dare to think he could get away with this.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007229
Claudia Rosett gives the UN Talking Points Post-Volcker Report a thorough Fisking ...
TALKING POINTS
IIC FINAL REPORT
September, 2005
A TOUGH AND THOROUGH INVESTIGATION. Over the course of the last 16 months, the IIC has conducted an exhaustive inquiry into the oil-for-food programme both on the management and contracting sides. This comprehensive final report shines a bright light on both problems and successes. It follows three major interim reports as well as the review of more than 50 audits. Over 75 investigators, lawyers and forensic accountants conducted over 1,000 interviews across six continents, and more than 12 million pages of documents were collected. No stone was left unturned. As Mr. Volcker himself said, few organizations have been willing to subject themselves to this level of scrutiny.
Who said the U.N. was willing to subject itself to scrutiny? Despite public reports of gross corruption for years while Oil-for-Food was underway, Annan refused to authorize an investigation until April, 2004 — five months after the program came to an end, and a full year after the overthrow of Saddam. Even then, it was only after Congress threatened to hold hearings, following press reports implicating the head of the program in graft, and the son of Annan in U.N.-related business, that Annan finally conceded the need for an “independent inquiry.”
And while maybe no stone was left unturned, a lot of questions remain unanswered, including some that involve documents shredded by Annan’s former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, as well as memory lapses of both Kofi Annan’s special adviser Maurice Strong and Annan himself.
During Oil-for-Food, the U.N. refused to answer vital questions from the press on grounds that much of the information was “confidential.” When the program ended, Annan stonewalled questions from the press on grounds that “As far as I know, nobody in the Secretariat has committed any wrong-doing.” Once the Volker inquiry began, the U.N. refused to answer questions from the press on grounds that the investigation was “ongoing.” And the day after Volcker delivered his report, when correspondents at the U.N.’s Sept. 8 noon press briefing figured the U.N. would finally answer questions about it, the secretary-general’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric refused, on grounds that the “definitive” report has been delivered and “we’re not going back into details of that investigation.”
IT IS TIME TO FOCUS ON THE IMPORTANT REFORM AGENDA. The Inquiry’s findings underscore the vital importance of proposed management reforms. For his part, the Secretary-General has taken action where he can. His proposals for further improvements are now being negotiated ahead of next week’s summit. Next week’s summit gives world leaders a golden opportunity to strengthen the UN so that it can best rise to the inevitable challenges that the future holds.
At the moment, the secretary-general’s inevitable challenge centers chiefly on brassing out this scandal long enough to hang onto his job. He is doing this regardless of the cost to the U.N., and despite his record of dereliction, incompetence, and odd obliviousness to, if not conscious tolerance of, massive graft, waste, and corruption evident even to many outside the organization. Annan would have us believe he never noticed his son’s abuse of U.N. perquisites for everything from lobbying for business to shipping a Mercedes to Ghana. He failed abysmally to ensure honest management or even adequate auditing of Oil-for-Food, the biggest relief program the U.N. has ever undertaken. And U.N. staff members are now receiving instructions to tout the virtues of Annan as a leader of reform.
UN WAS FULLY COOPERATIVE. As the Secretary-General pledged when he commissioned the IIC, the UN has cooperated fully with the investigation, providing unrestricted access to all relevant UN records and information as well as officials and personnel, regardless of seniority.
Vanished down the U.N. memory hole is the shredding of U.N. documents last year by Annan’s former chief of staff Iqbal Riza, after the Volcker committee had ordered them preserved. The shredded documents covered the same period, 1997-1999, in which Annan appointed Benon Sevan to head Oil-for-Food, Sevan began taking bribes from Saddam, Kofi Annan repeatedly petitioned the Security Council to greatly expand the program, and Kojo Annan worked for a company that on Dec. 31, 1998, won a U.N. contract to inspect Oil-for-Food imports into Iraq.
UN HAS ACTED IMMEDIATELY ON PAST FINDINGS. The Secretary-General has made good on his promise to take disciplinary action against those found to have committed wrongdoing. The UN cooperated with US government criminal inquiries and when former UN procurement official Alexander Yakovlev was indicted, the Secretary-General immediately waived his diplomatic immunity. The Secretary-General is also prepared to lift the diplomatic immunity of Benon Sevan, the former head of the oil-for-food programme, in response to any properly supported request from an appropriate law enforcement authority. Another official, Joseph Stephanides, was dismissed by the Secretary-General after the IIC found he had acted improperly in influencing a decision on contracting.
O.K., but Yakovlev, who worked in procurement, not Oil-for-Food, ran his schemes for years, and got nabbed by the feds only after a media report, not a U.N. inquiry, outed details leading to his secret offshore bank account. All things considered, it would have looked bad even by U.N. standards for Annan to defend Yakovlev’s immunity, especially after he had already resigned. Sevan was given enough warning to cash out his U.N. pension and make his getaway to Cyprus, which has no extradition treaty with the U.S.
So, with both Annan and his deputy secretary-general, Louise Frechette, hanging onto their jobs, the only U.N. employee actually penalized so far over the multibillion dollar Oil-for-Food scandal is Joseph Stephanides — who had a far lesser role in the program, wasn’t accused of taking money and is now appealing Annan’s decision to fire him.
IIC REFORMS ADOPTED. The Secretary-General has already taken measures not requiring General Assembly approval that are in line with the IIC recommendations aimed at correcting management lapses. These include:
*Announcing the creation of his own internal oversight committee to follow-up on audit recommendations.
*Proposing that the General Assembly establish a totally independent Oversight Advisory Committee which would guarantee the operational independence of the Office for Internal Oversight Services.
*Committing to a proactive approach to oversight of large donor-funded humanitarian aid programmes, including enhanced standards of documentation, financial controls, oversight and reporting.
*Enhancing the UN procurement system to make it more transparent and accountable by full disclosure of details of all contracts on the Internet.
*Commissioning an internal investigation and thorough, external review of UN procurement with a view to strengthening supervision and controls over individual procurement officers.
*A host of internal management improvements such as stronger protection for whistleblowers, greater disclosure of potential conflicts of interest and mandatory ethics training are nearing completion.
The one promising note in here is the word “transparent.” That would be more reassuring had U.N. officials not been insisting this spring that the procurement department was already transparent (which it was not) as well as clean (which was the U.N. talking point just before the bribery scandal broke, leading to the two recent indictments of Russian U.N. officials). The U.N. has run through most of these reforms before, establishing the Office of Internal Oversight Services in 1994, engaging in sweeping” reform” under Annan when he took charge in 1997; reforming again under Annan in 2002, and announcing last year a whole new set of protections for whistleblower — a species so endangered at the U.N. that they evidently need stronger protection every year.
OFFP ACHIEVED ITS PURPOSE. The inquiry makes clear that the UN achieved much of OFFP’s mission to provide humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people living under sanctions. The inquiry found that a variety of UN agencies delivered much-needed relief aid, cutting malnutrition rates and preventing the outbreak of disease.
Hey, give anyone $39 billion (or $46 billion or $64 billion or $67 billion, depending on whether you count relief contracts approved, total oil revenues, or oil-revenues plus bank interest), and you can probably get goods delivered. Just don’t let anyone ask about the cost, in terms of fortifying Saddam’s totalitarian regime, filling his secret bank accounts, funding his traffic in arms — conventional, perhaps, but still deadly, and — oh, yes — corrupting the U.N.’s own Secretariat and Security Council. Also, don’t invite anyone to look too closely at those relief numbers, which according to the Volcker committee’s own expert study were based on inconclusive, incomplete data, widely at odds with even less reliable, earlier U.N. figures.
RESPONSIBILITY FOR MANAGEMENT INCLUDES THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL. The IIC found that roles and responsibilities between this Council, the 661 Committee and the Secretariat were unclear. The Council retained substantial elements of operational control within the 661 committee, composed of national diplomats working under highly politicized instructions from their home governments, yet willing to take decisions only when there was unanimous consent among its fifteen members.
The fat budget for oversight belonged to Annan’s Secretariat, not the Security Council. Over the life of the program, the Secretariat got 2.2 percent of Saddam’s oil revenues, amounting to $1.4 billion, to administer Oil-for-Food. The only point of entrusting the Secretariat with this whopping amount of money was to ensure the integrity of Saddam’s commerce and the equitable distribution of goods to the Iraqi people. Oops.
WHOLESALE CORRUPTION WITHIN OFFP TOOK PLACE AMONG PRIVATE COMPANIES WHILE SMUGGLING PROVIDED MOST REVENUE. One of the most important findings of the IIC report is that illegal oil smuggling between Iraq and its neighbors was a major source of revenue for the Hussein regime during OFFP. Of the $12.8 billion earned illegally, more than 90 per cent — nearly $11 billion — was derived from smuggling and illicit border trade. Responsibility for monitoring the smuggling fell to a multinational force — not the UN.
It was Annan whose Secretariat hired the inspectors to monitor oil sold by Iraq, and who urged the Security Council repeatedly, at length, and in detail, to let Saddam use some of the Oil-for-Food relief money to import billions worth of oil parts. That series of events allowed the big increase in Iraqi oil output that enabled the vast rise in smuggling that accompanied the Oil-for-Food program. Like many others, Annan knew about the smuggling at the time, but in his special capacity as top official at the U.N., he failed to speak up. Now he is urging his staff to “step out boldly” while he promises “to do whatever I can to ensure that in the future we all have the highest expectations of each other, and that we actually meet them.” Fascinating; but if Annan’s reform is all about living up to high expectations, then why is his staff getting instructions to deflect, divert, forget, fudge, stonewall, and if all else fails, blame somebody else?
— Claudia Rosett is a journalist in residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
http://www.nationalreview.com/rosett/rosett200509090924.asp
* * *
Resquiscat in Pace - the United Nations
Of course, it will still be there in name, serving discount lunches to diplomats in the cafeteria, and the Secretariat Building will not yet be turned over to The Donald to be retrofitted as a gold-plated hotel/casino in Turtle Bay, but it might as well be, considering the pallid reform package the General Assembly was able to muster today. The Washington Post sums up:
The negotiators were forced to put off action on some of the thorniest and most ambitious goals, including proposals to expand the U.N. Security Council, to create an independent auditing board to scrutinize U.N. spending, and to impose basic membership standards for a new Human Rights Council so that chronic rights abusers will not be able to join.
So, despite all, the Volcker Report on Oil-for-Food's call for independent auditing evidently had no impact (the endless corruption spigot's still on), ditto the Koizumi electoral smash. Despite its vastly stronger economy and healthier system, Japan stays off the Security Council for the benefit of trivial France and dysfunctional Russia. It's hard to see what Cuba and Venezuela - the only countries not to sign the compromise document - have to complain about. They can employ whatever totalitarian pactices they wish and still be assured places of importance on the UN Human Rights Commission, possibly edge out Libya for the presidency.
Over the next few days, speeches will be made by world leaders, advances proclaimed and journalistic appraisals written, but what we are watching are the death throes of an organization. Even after the revelation that the United Nations had presided over the greatest financial scam in world history, the Iraq Oil-for-Food programme, the organization was not able to make the most paltry effort at reforming itself. No one - certainly not the United States - is going to give it serious funding from now on. The UN is now a ghost ship, heading up the East River. Wave good-bye. It's gone.
www.rogerlsimon.com
For those interested, here's an instructional link (Hat tip to The Powerline Blog) ...
http://www.eyeontheun.org/
Saddam’s friends
One of the most controversial of Saddam’s apologists, Father Benjamin, defender of terrorists, favorite guest of tv talk-shows, friend of Tareq Aziz (he even invited him to the Vatican before the war), with an impressive political backing has been caught red handed.
An investigation by Claudio Gatti, published on Il Sole 24 Ore, a financial Italian daily, has discovered his Swiss bank account, where Saddam deposited US$140.000 in exchange for his “services”.
I hope other brave journalists will follow this example so that the filthy mouths of the various Galloways, Ritter & Co. will be shut once and for all (ht Liberopensiero).
http://cmarlow.blogspot.com/2005/09/saddams-friends-one-of-most.html
For those literate in Italian ...
http://www.informazionecorretta.com/showPage.php?template=rassegna&id=6501
The Buck Still Hasnt Stopped
by Claudia Rosett
10/03/2005, Volume 011, Issue 03
ON SEPTEMBER 7, PAUL Volcker's inquiry into the Oil-for-Food program issued its "definitive report" on the biggest relief program--also the biggest scandal--in the history of the United Nations. The investigation alone cost $34 million, took over 16 months, and employed some 75 staff from 28 countries. Running to four volumes and totaling 847 pages, the report is hefty. But definitive it is not.
Volcker's report is at best a beginning, and a skewed and incomplete one at that. To be fair, credit is due to some of the investigators on Volcker's staff, who have conducted many interviews and toiled down many byways of the U.N. paper trail to produce such items as footnote 64, page 27, Volume III. Here we find that "kickbacks were levied on all or nearly all contracts" among the thousands of U.N.-approved deals done by Saddam Hussein, as the program, during its final years, hit its full multibillion annual stride. The investigators have also painstakingly documented such findings as the one on page 124 of Volume III. Here we find that, during Oil-for-Food, Secretary General Kofi Annan, his deputy secretary-general, Louise Fréchette, and his chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, "were all informed of the issue of kickbacks, but remained passive."
But somewhere between the Volcker committee's labors on the ground and the conclusions of the three commissioners at the top--former Fed chairman Volcker, South African justice Richard Goldstone, and Swiss lawyer Mark Pieth--a fog descends. Despite the load of detail, illuminating and deeply damning to the United Nations, the result is a patchwork of dropped leads and watered-down judgments, leading in some cases to unwarranted and even bizarre conclusions.
Not that getting to the bottom of Oil-for-Food could ever be easy. The program was vast. From 1996 to 2003, it was supposed to ensure that more than $110 billion worth of oil sales and relief purchases contracted by Saddam's regime were honest, and that the proceeds were fairly distributed to ease the suffering of more than 24 million people in U.N.-sanctioned Iraq. But, under cover of U.N. secrecy, with the United Nations' approval, and while the international body assured the public that Oil-for-Food was one of its most efficient programs ever, Saddam, by Volcker's estimate, skimmed and smuggled his way to $12.8 billion in illicit income. And this is a conservative estimate that omits some rather obvious scams. By more complete estimates, Saddam swiped as much as $17 billion or upwards. There is abundant evidence--turned up by Congress, Treasury, the CIA, private investigators, and the media--that these illicit billions went not only to build palaces, but also to fortify Saddam's Baathist dictatorship, restock at least his conventional arsenal, bribe politicians, pay off accomplices worldwide, and fill secret bank accounts that may have funded terrorists during Saddam's reign--and may still be funding them today. This picture of where the money went is vital to grasping the full implications of the United Nations' corruption and dereliction in running Oil-for-Food. But Volcker has deferred almost all discussion of it to an "additional report," due out with a lot less fanfare next month.
If Volcker's September 7 "main report" is to be the final word on U.N. management of this fiasco, then the bottom line is this: Under a program involving thousands of U.N. employees, nine U.N. agencies, and an administrative budget totaling $1.4 billion, the United Nations abetted Saddam Hussein in one of the biggest heists in history--and no one, except for a couple of third-tier U.N. officials, is being punished for it. Annan, having taken "responsibility," is still at his post. His deputy, Louise Fréchette, having directly supervised the corrupt official heading Oil-for-Food, is now in charge of U.N. reform. And the former head of Oil-for-Food, Benon Sevan, accused by Volcker of taking at least $147,000 in bribes from Saddam, has been allowed to cash in his U.N. pension and leave the country.
The two U.N. officials penalized to date played relatively small roles in the Oil-for-Food saga. One is a former political affairs officer, Joseph Stephanides, who was never accused of taking a bribe and is appealing Annan's decision to fire him. The other is a Russian staffer in the U.N. procurement department, Alexander Yakovlev, portrayed in an initial, interim report from Volcker this past February as a champion of U.N. integrity. Only after media reports documenting otherwise did Volcker report in August that Yakovlev had tried unsuccessfully to solicit a bribe via Oil-for-Food. (Yakovlev entered a guilty plea in a Manhattan federal court last month for scams that appear to have centered on U.N. business outside Oil-for-Food.)
These are the predictably thin results of a report that, despite such media descriptions as "blistering," arrives again and again at oddly limp conclusions regarding individual U.N. officials. No doubt by the standards of a United Nations unaccustomed to anyone poking through its files, peering at its books, or asking the secretary-general to explain his own organizational chart, Volcker's findings were a sharp rebuke. The preface criticizes not only Oil-for-Food, but the United Nations as a whole, quite rightly, for "managerial weaknesses," "ethical lapses," and "serious instances of illicit, unethical and corrupt behavior," along with a "grievous absence of effective auditing and management controls."
And yet, more than 800 pages later, as the volume wends to Volcker's final recommendation that the United Nations add another branch of bureaucracy by establishing "an office of ethics," the buck still hasn't stopped. Having enjoyed unlimited access to U.N. records and personnel, Volcker's committee shows a whole series of top officials, including both Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, wandering oblivious through a gauntlet of Iraqi schemes to subvert and manipulate Oil-for-Food via everything from bags of cash to open demands for kickbacks.
Part of the problem is that Volcker has imposed on his inquiry the standards not of a prosecutor, but of an accountant. Faced with a pole too tall to measure by hand, he instead tells us its precise circumference on the ground, and lets it go at that. Much has been aired already of Volcker's account of Annan's strange and abiding ignorance of his own son's lively lobbying for U.N.-related business. So let us focus on another character, Annan's former special adviser Maurice Strong, longtime U.N. guru of good governance. (Strong did depart the United Nations this spring, but with Annan's office expressing fervent hopes he will soon return.)
At some length, Volcker does the genuine service of laying out how Strong, in mid-1997, received a check for $988,885 made out to his name (a copy can be found on page 106, Volume II). The check was drawn on a Jordanian bank, funded by Saddam's regime, and delivered by Korean businessman Tongsun Park, who was a U.N. "back-channel" go-between with Saddam. Strong endorsed the check over to a third party to invest in a Strong family-controlled business, Cordex Petroleum. Interviewed by Volcker's team earlier this year, Strong said he did not recall receiving such a check. When shown a copy, he said he did not know the money came from Iraq. Volcker leaves the matter there, concluding that "the Committee has found no evidence that Mr. Strong was involved in Iraqi affairs, matters relating to the [Oil-for-Food] Programme or took any actions at the request of Iraqi officials."
But how hard did the Volcker committee look? In July 1997, the month before Strong cashed the Saddam-backed check, Annan was issuing his first U.N. reform program, reshaping the secretariat. Strong was the major architect of that reform, and was thanked profusely by Annan at the time for "his important contributions." A significant aspect of that reform was the consolidation of the then-new, ad hoc, and diffuse Iraq Oil-for-Food program into a single, more firmly entrenched office. This move tilted control of the daily administration of Oil-for-Food away from the Security Council and toward the secretariat. When the new, unified office set up shop three months later, in October 1997, Annan appointed Sevan as executive director. That marked the beginning of the stretch in which Sevan began taking bribes from Saddam, and the Oil-for-Food program, urged on by Annan, began to grow astronomically in size and scope. Lacking any disclosure of the secret U.N. paper trail that led to the creation of this office and its expanded mission, it is impossible to know whether Strong took a direct hand in setting up the office from which Sevan then, in effect, collaborated with Saddam. Perhaps Strong had nothing to do with it. But Volcker doesn't even ask the question.
Only in the case of Sevan, already documented in the press before the Volcker inquiry got started in mid-2004, does Volcker assign blame to a specific individual. And even there, the Volcker committee fumbled, issuing an interim report last February, which, after eight months of preliminary investigation, merely rebuked Sevan for engaging in a "grave and continuing conflict of interest." Two weeks later, Sen. Norm Coleman's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations accused Sevan outright of having taken bribes from Saddam. By the time Volcker finally worked around in his third interim report, August 8, to repeating the accusation, Sevan had made use of the intervening months to cash in his U.N. pension and leave New York. He is now widely believed to be back in his native Cyprus, which has no extradition treaty with the United States.
It's all enough to raise questions about the agenda of the Volcker probe itself. As it happens, Rep. Henry Hyde's Committee on International Relations is planning to do just that. Hyde's investigators expect to focus on, among other things, why one of Volcker's lead investigators, Robert Parton, defected this past April with boxes of evidence. Parton explained via his lawyer that he had resigned on "principle" because the second of Volcker's three interim reports had been too soft on Annan. Volcker went through the courts to silence Parton, but that arrangement is about to end. Hyde's inquiry is expected to issue a report on the United Nations later this fall. Coleman's investigators into Oil-for-Food are also due to check in. Federal prosecutors have issued a number of indictments related to U.N. corruption. And--who knows?--Volcker next month gets one more chance.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/118nzmcw.asp?pg=1
Procurement Scandal: New Conflict of Interest in Annan's Inner Circle?
Claudia Rosett and George Russell
UNITED NATIONS; United Nations investigators scrambling to discover the extent of a bribery scandal spreading out from the organization's procurement department may soon be looking toward the building's 38th floor & the U.N's executive offices.
Bubbling up from the procurement scandal is yet another apparent conflict of interest, this one linked to the inner circle of the secretary-general by way of veteran U.N. diplomat Giandomenico Picco (search). An Italian, Picco has served as one of the United Nations' most trusted envoys, specializing in navigating hotspots such as Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.
Now, confidential corporate documents obtained by FOX News show that while serving as a U.N. under-secretary general and personal representative of Kofi Annan, Picco was also for part of that time chairman of the board of a mysterious and controversial company, IHC Services (search).
During Picco's tenure as board chairman, IHC did big business with the United Nations, some of it via a U.N. procurement staffer with whom IHC had especially close ties, Alexander Yakovlev (search). Yakovlev this summer was convicted of federal charges involving bribe-taking and money-laundering.
In an e-mail response to written questions from FOX News, Picco has denied that he himself had any part in any wrongdoing, "or any interaction with the U.N. procurement office on behalf of IHC or any other company." He also asserted that he never held the two roles of U.N. representative and IHC chairman at the same time.
More ...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,171216,00.html
From LGF (http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog) ...
France’s former representative to the United Nations Security Council has been taken into custody, in the Oil-For-Food investigation.
PARIS (AFP) - Jean-Bernard Merimee, France’s former representative at the UN Security Council, was taken into custody by a judge investigating corruption linked to the Iraqi “oil-for-food” programme.
Merimee, 68, was being questioned over allegations he may have benefited from oil allocations granted under the programme by former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein between 1996 and 2003.
Merimee was France’s UN ambassador from 1991 to 1995. He was then named ambassador to Italy, and from 1999 to 2002 he was a special adviser to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan on European issues.
Five people have already been placed under judicial investigation by judge Philippe Courroye in connection with the “oil-for-food” affair.
They are Serge Boidevaix, former secretary-general at the French foreign ministry; businessman Claude Kaspereit; Bernard Guillet, an adviser to former French interior minister Charles Pasqua; Gilles Munier, head of an Iraqi-French friendship society; and Palestinian journalist Hamida Nana.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051011/wl_mideast_afp/iraqoilunfrance_051011142716
Paris distances itself from oil-for-food suspects
PARIS, Oct 12 (AFP) - The French foreign ministry Wednesday distanced itself from two former senior diplomats who are implicated in an investigation into corruption related to Iraq's oil-for-food programme.
"According to the information we have, Messieurs Serge Boidevaix and Jean-Bernard Mérimée are the subjects of legal action to do with their private activities carried out after their retirement," ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei told journalists.
Mérimée, 68, French ambassador to the United Nations in New York -- and therefore a Security Council regular -- between 1991 and 1995, was Monday taken into custody by a French judge probing alleged allocations granted under the oil-for-food programme by deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein between 1996 and 2003.
Boidevaix, 77, a former secretary-general at the French foreign ministry, is one of five other people already placed under judicial investigation by judge Philippe Courroye in connection with the case.
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?
subchannel_id=25&story_id=24407&name=Paris+distances+itself+from+oil%2Dfor%2Dfood+ suspects
Claudia Rosett has more here. (http://www.nationalreview.com/rosett/rosett200510130832.asp)
Oil-for-Food... What it's really about....
I don't look at them much, but sometimes I see myself disparaged on liberalist blogs (I think that's a better word than liberal, which doesn't really apply) for my "obsession" with the Oil-for-Food scandal. What's a little corruption, they seem to be asking (when they are not busy bashing me as an apostate)? After all, graft is pandemic. Why get so excited by one case? Well, the answer, my friends, is blowing in the London Timesonline today (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1824684,00.html) ...
TWO former French ambassadors have admitted earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sale of oil that Iraq had assigned to them under the United Nations Oil-for-Food programme.
The disclosure tarnished France's moral stand against the invasion of Iraq, and its Foreign Ministry scrambled to distance itself from the alleged illicit activities of Serge Boidevaix, a former director of the ministry, and of Jean-Bernard Mérimée, a former French Ambassador to the UN. Both are facing corruption charges.
Jean-Baptiste Mattei, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said: "There is no link . . . with the decision of France not to participate in the Iraq war. This stemmed from our concept of international law."
Word that the two men had acknowledged payoffs from Baghdad has embarrassed the ministry, which fears that the actions of two retired diplomats will be used to discredit President Chirac's opposition towards the invasion of Iraq.
Prosecution proceedings have been opened against both men on charges of influence peddling and corruptly acting for a foreign power. Le Monde reported that M Mérimée, 68, who served as UN Ambassador in the early 1990s, told Philippe Courroye, the investigating judge, that he had made $150,000 (£85,800) from two million barrels of oil that had been assigned to him in 2001.
Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, had given him the oil vouchers as thanks for his lobbying efforts on behalf of Iraq, Le Monde said. He was serving at the time as a special adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN SecretaryGeneral.
It's not just about graft. It's about the preservation of fascism for money. You down with that, liberalists? Think about it in your hearts. This isn't about Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives and all the rest of that left-over Eighteenth Century sports terminology. This is about real human beings who were living in a country where the dictator tossed people in paper shredders while his minions bought him protection on the UN Security Council. No thriller writer could get away with a plot like that, but Saddam Hussein did... with the help of his buddies Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan.
www.rogerlsimon.com
Volcker asks U.S., allies to link U.N. budget to reform
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 19, 2005
The United States and its allies should threaten to cut the budget of the United Nations if it fails to end corruption and adopt badly needed reforms, the man who led the probe into the U.N. oil-for-food scandal said yesterday.
http://washingtontimes.com/world/20051018-114900-1796r.htm
al-Canine
10-23-2005, 10:55 PM
Wow, Oscar Wyatt. Who'da thunk?
Oilman Indicted Over Kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's Regime
By JULIA PRESTON and SIMON ROMERO
Oscar S. Wyatt Jr., the flamboyant Texas oil trader who flaunted his close ties to the regime of Saddam Hussein, was indicted yesterday in federal court in New York on charges that he paid millions of dollars in kickbacks to the regime to sell Iraqi oil under a United Nations program.
The indictment says that Mr. Wyatt was informed by Iraqi officials sometime in the fall of 2000 that he and other traders would have to begin paying secret surcharges to continue to be granted the right to sell Iraqi oil under the United Nations oil- for-food program.
In fax messages and telephone calls over the next two years, the indictment says, Mr. Wyatt arranged for the secret payments to be made through Swiss intermediaries and overseas companies that he set up. The money, the indictment says, was deposited in Iraqi government accounts in a bank in Jordan.
The indictment was unusually detailed because it is based in part on recorded telephone conversations between Mr. Wyatt and his representatives, and the El Paso Corporation's oil traders. Mr. Wyatt founded the Coastal Corporation, an energy company that El Paso acquired in early 2001 in a deal that eventually led to a bitter dispute between Mr. Wyatt and El Paso's senior executives.
Mr. Wyatt can he heard in those calls discussing the surcharge payments and also reporting on secret fees he paid to be allowed to load oil in Iraqi ports, according to the indictment.
Mr. Wyatt was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents at 6 a.m. yesterday at his home in River Oaks, the most exclusive residential district in Houston. He was released on $2.5 million bail secured by a property he owns in Colorado, and is scheduled to be arraigned in Federal District Court in Manhattan next Thursday.
Mr. Wyatt, through his lawyer, denied the charges yesterday. "Mr. Wyatt has violated no laws and will rigorously defend against these charges," the lawyer, Carl Parker, said in a statement.
Mr. Wyatt, 81, is one of the last legendary Texas oilmen, a former drill-bit salesman who put together several ambitious international energy ventures. His company, the Coastal Corporation, eventually became one of the largest importers of Iraqi crude oil into the United States, until Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. After the United Nations allowed Iraq to begin selling oil again, Mr. Wyatt and Coastal were awarded the first tanker shipment to leave the country, in December 1996.
He is the most prominent American businessman to be swept up so far in the widening criminal investigations in New York of corruption in the United Nations program, in which proceeds from sales of Iraqi oil were supposed to go into a United Nations account to be used to buy food, medicines and other goods for the Iraqi people.
El Paso, which is not facing charges in the indictment, acknowledged that it had been responding to requests for information from investigators about its dealings with Mr. Wyatt.
"We continue to cooperate with the U.S. attorney's office, the S.E.C. and various Congressional committees," Richard Wheatley, a spokesman for El Paso, said in a statement.
The charges describe at least $3.9 million in back-door payments Mr. Wyatt and his companies are accused of making from 2000 to 2002 to Iraqi government accounts in the Jordan National Bank in Amman.
The indictment says that Mr. Wyatt's representatives were informed by Iraqi officials in a meeting in Vienna in the fall of 2000 that he would have to begin paying a surcharge directly to the Iraqi government to continue to receive allotments of oil to sell.
Mr. Wyatt, the indictment says, was not dissuaded. He arranged to make the illegal payments through two Cyprus-based corporations he set up and through a Swiss energy trading consulting company, Sarenco S.A. The companies were operated by two Swiss citizens, Catalina del Socorro Miguel Fuentes and Mohammed Saidji. Both, along with the companies, were also named in yesterday's indictment.
Federal prosecutors have recovered fax messages, invoices and bank statements that they say describe the illegal payments. The indictment cites one phone call on Dec. 21, 2001, made shortly after a Dec. 9 payment of 222,000 euros to the Iraqi accounts in Jordan. In it, Mr. Wyatt complained to an El Paso trader about "that $200,000 I've already paid," the indictment states.
Mr. Wyatt is also accused of lobbying United Nations officials to persuade them to lower the officially designated selling price of Iraqi oil, to leave a margin that would allow Mr. Wyatt and his associates to pay the surcharges and still make a profit on the oil sales.
The charges against Mr. Wyatt came in a superseding indictment that expanded on one brought in April against another Texas oil trader, David B. Chalmers; his company, Bayoil Inc.; and two of his associates, John Irving and Ludmil Dionissiev.
Mr. Wyatt is accused of conspiracy, wire fraud and trading with a country that has been designated by the United States as supporting terrorism. Mr. Wyatt has known for at least a year that he was under investigation.
Mr. Wyatt, Ms. Miguel Fuentes and Mr. Saidji each face a maximum of 62 years in prison and a maximum fine of at least $1 million. Sarenco and two other companies operated by Mr. Wyatt face fines of at least $2 million. The government is seeking criminal forfeiture of property of at least $1 billion from all the defendants.
The inquiry by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York has also yielded indictments against Tongsun Park, a South Korean lobbyist, and Vladimir Kuznetsov, a Russian diplomat who formerly headed the United Nations budget watchdog committee.
Mr. Wyatt's arrest brings rare scrutiny to the murky world of oil trading and shipping, a business that relies largely on close contacts with officials at oil companies and in governments of oil-producing countries. Mr. Wyatt began traveling to Iraq in the early 1970's, shortly after the nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry, and established envied ties with officials in Baghdad.
Once described as "meaner than a junkyard dog" in a profile by Texas Monthly magazine, Mr. Wyatt started the Hardly Able Oil Company in 1951 using the proceeds from an $800 loan. He later founded the Coastal Corporation, which became his main conduit for dealings in the Middle East.
Mr. Wyatt cultivated a rough-hewn image, speaking out, for instance, against a Congressional effort to impose trade restrictions on Mr. Hussein's regime after it was discovered that it had used poison gas against the Kurds.
Mr. Wyatt's relationship with Mr. Hussein drew attention in late 1990, when he flew to Baghdad to negotiate the release of American oil field workers held hostage in Iraq. He was also an outspoken critic of the war led by the United States to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
Such positions appeared to come naturally to Mr. Wyatt, who would often travel to Vienna for meetings of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to maintain contacts with oil ministers from countries tarnished by sanctions, like Iraq or Libya.
Back in Houston, Mr. Wyatt's profile was often just as gruff, standing in contrast to that of his wife, Lynn, a doyenne of the city's flamboyant party scene.
The indictment is likely to shake Houston's arts and charitable communities. Mr. Wyatt's wife is known for her parties in the south of France and her work as the chairwoman of the Houston Grand Opera. She and Mr. Wyatt were recently seen at the Founders Suite, an exclusive enclave at Reliant Stadium in Houston where the city's elite watches the football games of the Houston Texans.
The federal investigation of the United Nations oil-for-food program has proceeded largely apart from the inquiry by the commission headed by Paul A. Volcker, and sometimes there have been tensions between them. Mr. Volcker announced yesterday that he would release his final report on the companies involved in oil-for-food corruption next Thursday.
Julia Preston reported from New York for this article and Simon Romero from Houston.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/business/22food.html
More Evidence Surfaces on Galloway and Saddam
This morning, the staff of Senator Norm Coleman's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations gave a press briefing to preview a new report on George Galloway's testimony before the subcommittee last May. The announcement of the press briefing said:
The briefing will provide a detailed analysis of Galloway’s sworn testimony as it relates to significant new information in the form of interviews, documents, bank account information, and Iraqi documents uncovered by the Subcommittee regarding the Oil-for-Food scandal.
The only article I've seen on the report is in Britain's left-wing Independent; the article is titled "Galloway lied over Iraqi oil payments, says Congress report." An excerpt:
In a report issued here, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman and his colleagues on the Senate Subcommittee for Investigations claim to have evidence showing that Mr Galloway's political organisation and his wife received vouchers worth almost $600,000 (£338,000) from the then Iraqi government.
"We have what we call the smoking gun," said Mr Coleman, who will send the report to the US Department of Justice and the British authorities. The MP could face charges of perjury, making false statements and obstructing a Congressional investigation.
Galloway, of course, denies receiving any money from Saddam; he claims to have supported the tyrant for free.
UPDATE: Here's more, from a subcommittee press release:
Since the May hearing, the Subcommittee has obtained further evidence establishing that the Hussein regime granted oil allocations to Galloway and his political organization, the “Mariam Appeal.” The Subcommittee report reveals that British MP George Galloway made false or misleading statements before the Subcommittee on May 17, 2005. Specifically, evidence gathered by the Subcommittee reveals:
* Galloway personally solicited and was granted eight oil allocations totaling 23 million barrels from the Hussein government from 1999 through 2003;
* Galloway’s wife, Dr. Amineh Abu-Zayyad, received approximately $150,000 in connection with one allocation of oil;
* Galloway’s political campaign, the Mariam Appeal, received at least $446,000 in connection with several allocations granted under the Oil-for-Food Program;
* Illegal “surcharge” payments in excess of $1.6 million were paid to the Hussein regime in connection with the oil allocations granted to Galloway and the Mariam Appeal; and
* Galloway knowingly made false or misleading statements under oath before the Subcommittee at its hearing on May 17, 2005.
The findings revealed in the Subcommittee’s report have been substantiated by personal interviews with high-level members of the Hussein regime, oil traders with personal knowledge of Galloway’s involvement, and extensive bank records that provide a conclusive paper trail and corroborate Galloway’s personal knowledge and involvement in the Oil-for-Food scandal.
www.powerlineblog.com
Galloway, of course, vehemently denies the charges. As one wag said, "I'm making popcorn."
More on Gorgeous George here. (http://badhairblog.blogspot.com/2005/10/mr_25.html)
Also here (fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com)
UN: Russia, France, China led Saddam's kickbacks list
New York (dpa) - Russian, French and Chinese companies that did business with the U.N. oil-for-food programme paid the bulk of some 1.8 billion dollars in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein, who also received billions more from oil smugglers, independent investigators said in their final report Thursday. I'm shocked, I say, shocked.
Governments approved private-sector contracts with the United Nations and Baghdad during the 1996-2003 programme with the former Iraqi regime - an involvement that has led to charges of corruption at the highest levels.
When the oil-for-food began, companies from all countries signed on. But by 2000, the report said, Saddam's regime gave preference to companies in Russia, France and China because those three countries favoured lifting U.N. economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 after it invaded Kuwait.
http://www.rantburg.com/images/surprise.jpg
Paul Volcker, the former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman who led the two-year inquiry, concluded the probe by saying reform of the United Nations was urgent.
Already, the fallout has included the jailing in France two weeks ago of former U.N. ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee, 68, accused of taking bribes from Saddam. Other governments have been less conspicuous in tracking down corrupted officials.
All revenues from the seven-year programme were deposited in escrow at France's Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), for use in a humanitarian programme that distributed daily food rations to up to 60 per cent of ordinary Iraqis, who were suffering under U.N. sanctions.
Volcker's final report found that a total of 4,500 companies from 66 countries signed contracts under the former programme to buy Iraqi oil and sell everything from food and medicine to machines and farm products to Iraq.
Companies and individuals were involved in illicit kickbacks, including 40 countries that paid the illicit surcharges on oil purchases imposed by the Saddam Hussein government beginning in 2000. The surcharge was 50 U.S. cents on top of the price for each barrel of oil.
It said the former dictator received at 1.8 billion dollars in kickbacks, an amount dwarfed by payments from oil smuggling by neighbouring countries, which was estimated at about 11 billion dollars. The oil smuggling was carried out outside the oil-for-food. U.N. headquarters received warnings it was going on, but nothing was done, the report said.
Saddam's regime had authority to choose customers and the amount to be sold to each customer, the report said. The programme ended after U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Volcker said the U.N. was responsible for mismanagement in the oil-for-food scheme and had been "weakened" by the scandal.
"That is why reform is so urgent," Volcker said in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The first reform would be to sack Kofi.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/breaking_news/breakingnews.php?id=58313
More on Marc Rich and UNSCAM (http://badhairblog.blogspot.com/)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1165000/images/_1168075_marcrich_afp150.jpg
Volcker changed language of report (Saving Annan @ UN)
Rediff India ^
Hat tip to FreeRepublic.
November 06, 2005 22:42 IST Last Updated: November 06, 2005 22:52 IST
With his report on Iraqi oil deals creating a political storm in India, Paul Volcker, in a startling revelation, has said he agreed to change the language that referred to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's son Kojo's business dealings.
Volcker, who investigated allegations of corruption in the UN's $64 billion Iraqi oil-for food programme, said he had no idea how much the 18-month probe would expose the vulnerabilities of the world body and how close he would come to toppling the Secretary-General as its leader.
"It had that potential from the start," Volcker said in an interview to the Los Angeles Times.
But when it came to the moment when he realized that Annan's job hung on his words, Volcker said, "I felt uncomfortable."
The daily said the UN chief and his lawyer asked Volcker to change the language about business dealings by Kojo Annan that they thought could force his father's resignation, hours before the publication of the draft forward of the report in September.
Volcker agreed. "It was merely a part of the due process," he was quoted as saying.
Before releasing the September report on Annan, Volcker met Annan and his lawyer to discuss (Annan's resignation) the harsh conclusion.
"The wording we had was that Annan's performance did not meet the standards of the United Nations," Volcker said, adding, "And there was more, along the same vein." Not even its usual low standards, I might add.
Asked on Thursday, the day the controversial report in which External Affairs Minister K Natwar Singh and Congress Party have been named as non-contractual "beneficiaries" of the programme, whether he thought the UN chief knew about his son's attempts to use his father's connections for his company's benefit, Volcker said, "To this day, I still don't know."
A UN official with knowledge of the meeting said the conclusions cited a failure by Annan in management and oversight, together with a failure to keep close tabs on his son's questionable business dealings.
Annan's reaction, said another person with knowledge of the meeting, was that the way the conclusions were phrased implied that he favoured Cotecna's (the Swiss firm for which Kojo worked) bid, and made him look so bad that it might force his resignation. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
Annan's lawyer, Gregory Craig, asked that the findings be dealt with separately, because Annan took responsibility for the management issues, but not for his son's behaviour, of which he says he had no knowledge.
"We presented the facts, and they spoke for themselves," Annan told The Times about the meeting.
Volcker agreed.
Even if he had doubts that Annan was unaware of Cotecna's bid, he was convinced that Annan had not influenced the contract. It was not worth toppling a secretary-general.
"No one ever said he had influenced the process, and that was an important consideration," Volcker said.
"That he did not do a proper investigation of his son's possible conflict of interest was the key point. It would have saved him a lot of trouble," Volcker said.
He concluded that Kojo Annan dealt in a shady world of many bank accounts, false contracts and friends of convenience.
But there was no evidence, he said, that Annan influenced the award of the contract, or even definitively knew that his son's company was bidding for it.
"Nobody disagrees that there were four or five times when you raise your eyebrows and say, 'Didn't it dawn on Kofi that Cotecna was involved?' But then you say, 'Then again, maybe not,'" Volcker said.
What say you?
http://us.rediff.com/news/2005/nov/06volcker6.htm?q=tp&file=.htm
French envoy admits "I took Saddam's Cash" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/18/wfrance18.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/11/18/ixworld.html)
Let There Be Light . . .
. . . in the murkiest recesses of the United Nations.
BY BRET STEPHENS
Saturday, December 3, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
NEW YORK--Paul Volcker is at ease. Sitting behind the desk of his Rockefeller Center corner office--which seems much too small for his 6-foot-8 frame--the former chairman of the Federal Reserve has the half-weary, half-satisfied look of a writer who's just inked the last sentence of an unexpectedly long and tangled tale. Which, in a sense, is what he is. Taken together, the five reports of his Independent Inquiry into the U.N.'s Oil for Food scandal--which took 18 months and $34 million to complete--run to some 2,000 pages.
And what a story they tell. (http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007630)
Documents Demonstrate Annan On Thin Ice. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,178045,00.html)
UN Investigator claims Kofi Annan lied about Kojo's role. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/09/wannan09.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/12/09/ixworld.html)
http://rantburg.com/images/surprise.jpg
Congressional report calls for investigation of Maurice Strong's role in Oil-for-Food scandal
By Judi McLeod
Friday, December 9, 2005
A draft congressional report has called for the investigation of Canadian Maurice Strong’s role in the United Nations Oil-for-Food program.
Page 35 of the 54-page report, written by Republicans on a House International Relations subcommittee states: "Maurice Strong should be examined for his role in the OFFP."
Strong is a long-time advisor to both UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and to Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.
On Sept. 7, 2005 it was revealed by the Independent Inquiry into the Oil-for-Food scandal that Strong had received a $1-million cheque from North Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park for the acquisition of shares in Cordex Petroleum Inc.–a Maurice Strong company.
Cordex Petroleum was also on the listing of assets of Paul Martin in his declaration of assets while he was Minister of Finance.
The $1-million, invested in the now defunct Cordex by Tongsun Park, originated from the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Following the path of the Saddam-to-Park-to-Cordex money trail tells a tawdry tale.
Park, allegedly an influence peddler for Saddam Hussein, reportedly took cash in a plastic bag to a Jordanian bank where he deposited it before writing "Mr. M. Strong" on a cheque in the amount of $988,885. The money was used by Strong to purchase a stake in Cordex Petroleum Inc., which was run by Strong’s son, Fred.
Cordex’s main investments were in oil properties in Chile and Argentina. In Argentina, the company was involved in a joint venture with Enron until it went bankrupt.
Strong maintains he knows nothing of the origin of the funds, and claims he has no ties to Oil-for-Food.
Strong admitted that he sometimes took advice from Park in his job as the UN special envoy in North Korea.
On July 6, 2004 Strong had requested a Canadian contribution of $400,000 over two years for a $2.2-million trust fund to support his special envoy activities in North Korea.
In July 2005, Strong’s contract with the UN as Special Envoy to North Korea was not renewed, and he seems to have since faded from public.
Canadian members of parliament voted against investigating whether Canada had any role in the UN Oil-for-Food scandal.
On April 21, 2005, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew said, "We note Mr. Strong’s very public statements about the nature of his dealings with Tongsun Park which he notes were related to Mr. Strong’s work in North Korea for the United Nations secretary general."
Conservative Foreign Affairs critic Stockwell Day asked, "Can the Prime Minister assure us that Canadians are not involved in the scandal surrounding the UN’s oil for food program, yes or no?"
Pettigrew responded: "Mr. Speaker, clearly the answer is no, they are not, We have noted the public statements by Mr. Strong concerning the nature of his dealings with Tongsun Park, in which he indicated that these were connected to his work relating to North Korea on behalf of the Secretary General of the UN."
While environmental leaders attending this week’s UN climate conference in Montreal expected to hear from Strong--who is generally accepted as the architect of the Kyoto protocol--they heard from Prime Minister Paul Martin instead.
Strong is rarely heard from since allegations of his ties to the oil-for-food scandal became public. Martin, who took time out the Canadian election campaign, did what Maurice Strong does best: criticize the United States of America.
The criticism Martin leveled against the U.S. coincided with the day the draft report of the House International Relations subcommittee became public.
Martin called on all nations to join the global effort to fight climate change, adding: "To the reticent nations, including the United States, I say there is such a thing as a global conscience, and now is the time to listen to it." (Toronto Star, Dec. 8, 2005).
At the time of writing, no Canadian media had carried the story that the subcommittee indicated that Strong’s role in the Oil-for-food scandal "should be examined".
Meanwhile, many Canadians do not recognize the name of Maurice Strong, let alone his alleged ties to the UN Oil-for-Food scandal.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/cover120905.htm
http://www.rantburg.com/images/galloway.jpg
Galloway faces new inquiry into Iraq charity. (http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/focusoniraq/2005/December/focusoniraq_December149.xml§ion=focusoniraq)
Rip Roaring Rant By Kooky Kofi
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan angrily accused a journalist of behaving "like an overgrown schoolboy" and being "an embarrassment to [his] profession" yesterday, for seeking to question his son Kojo's sleazy business dealings. (http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/59279.htm)
http://www.nypost.com/photos/news12222005020.jpg
"You are being very cheeky here."
Roger Simon is relieved Benon Sevan's elevator is working now. (http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2005/12/you_will_be_rel.php)
John Bolton has come out Swinging. (http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=20&artnum=1&issue=20051229)
Meanwhile, George Galloway seems to have landed a new prestigious role. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4584056.stm)
"Koreagate" Tongsun Park has been arrested (http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/cover010906.htm) in connection with the Oil For Food program.
Claudia Rossett explains what the Park arrest portends. (http://nationalreview.com/rosett/rosett200601102128.asp)
Scandal-plagued UN suspends staff. (http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,17847800%5E1702,00.html)
EIGHT UN officials have been suspended with pay as part of an investigation into the world body's procurement services following scandals in the oil-for-food program in Iraq, UN officials said this morning.
The investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services is the result of a probe into contracts in the UN peacekeeping department, which is fielding some 85,000 troops, police and civilians around the world.
Oh, and just how was Interpol - wanted Tongsun Park allowed to board a Panama - bound flight in Canada? (http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/cover011206.htm) Enquiring minds want to know ...
UN Procurement Scandal: Culture Of Impunity. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,182507,00.html)
How bad is the still expanding scandal in the United Nations' multi-billion-dollar procurement division? Based on a still-secret internal investigation, the answer is: for the U.N., it is just as bad as the gigantic Oil-for-Food debacle — or maybe worse.
The focus of the current scandal is U.N. peacekeeping, a function that consumes 85 percent of the U.N.'s procurement budget — a cost that could reach $2 billion in 2005. Like many of the U.N.'s financial dealings, it is shrouded in secrecy. And like the multi-billion-dollar Oil-for-Food scandal, it is wrapped in what the U.N.'s own investigators now call "systematic abuse," "a pattern of corrupt practices," and "a culture of impunity."
Claudia Rossett reports ...
Galloway faces Fraud Investigation. (http://politics.guardian.co.uk/otherparties/story/0,,1694270,00.html)
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/images/lefdts_galloway.jpg
George Galloway faces the prospect of a criminal investigation into his activities by the serious fraud office, which has collected evidence relating to the oil-for-food corruption scandal in Iraq.
A four-strong SFO team returned from Washington with what a source close to US investigators calls "thousands of documents" about the scandal. The team is expected to produce, within the next four weeks, a report for the SFO director, Robert Wardle, as to whether a full criminal investigation should be mounted into UK individuals and companies involved, including Mr Galloway, the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow.
The SFO is following up two official reports published before Christmas in Washington, which detailed banking evidence that Mr Galloway's wife and his political campaign organisation both received large sums from Saddam Hussein, laundered through under-the-counter oil allocations.
Mr Galloway is unaware of the SFO's activities. He is in the Channel 4 TV show Celebrity Big Brother and cut off from outside contact. He is expected to be evicted from the Big Brother house tonight.
In addition to the SFO's moves, the high court will hear the result of an appeal this morning by the Daily Telegraph against Mr Galloway's £150,000 libel award against the newspaper. In 2003, the newspaper accused him of taking cash from Saddam. Mr Galloway's lawyers were tight-lipped last night over the appeal ruling. If the paper fails today, it may take its case to the Lords, facing the MP with further potential costs in a case where legal fees already exceed £1m.
In turn, today's Telegraph appeal verdict could relaunch a parliamentary investigation into allegations that Mr Galloway broke House of Commons rules by failing to declare benefits he received from the Saddam regime. Mr Galloway persuaded Sir Philip Mawer, parliamentary commissioner for standards, to suspend his investigation because of the litigation.
Yesterday, a spokeswoman for Sir Philip said: "Once the verdict is known, the commissioner will take fresh legal advice on how best to proceed." The SFO's documents include bank records obtained by a Senate committee. Other Iraqi oil ministry documents have been obtained by the Volcker report into misuse of oil allocations.
Mr Galloway's wife and the MP have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. In a previous statement, he said: "I have never seen a barrel of oil, never bought one, never sold one, and neither has anyone on my behalf." His estranged wife, Amineh Abu Zayyad, said: "I have never solicited or received from Iraq or anyone else any proceeds of any oil deals, either for myself or for my former husband."
According to the US inquiries, big oil traders paid secret commissions in return for acquiring Iraqi shipments, which they frequently sold on to major US oil firms. The reports detail records of one alleged transaction in 2000 in which Taurus Petroleum gave $740,000 to Mr Galloway's agent, the businessman Fawwaz Zureikat.
Mr Zureikat distributed the cash in several directions. He kept some himself, and passed some over as a kickback to Saddam's regime.
He also gave $340,000 as a "donation" to Mr Galloway's pro-Iraq campaign, the Mariam Appeal, and another $150,000 to a bank account in Jordan belonging to Mr Galloway's wife. She in turn allegedly transferred $25,000 of that to her own account in London, though she denies the transaction. The Guardian tried to put the SFO allegations to Mr Galloway but Channel 4 refused to pass them on, saying: "We don't pass anything into the house unless something horrible has happened."
When the Volcker report came out Mr Galloway said: "How many times must I repeat this: I've never had a penny through oil deals and no one has produced a shred of evidence that I have ... A lie doesn't become a truth through repetition."
Last night a spokesman for Mr Galloway said: "There is no crime to investigate. This is politically motivated, specious, frippery. It is a total waste of public money."
Oh ... and Galloway has been voted off Big Brother. (http://gopvixen.blogs.com/gop_vixen/2006/01/so_long_farewel.html)
From Rantburg:
Claudia Rosett lunches with Benon Sevan. (http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008172)
I knocked. The tall, bespectacled 69-year-old answered, wearing a gray-and-blue T-shirt, warm-up pants, slippers and a thin gold watch. He recognized me instantly, and protested: "I don't want to talk to you. I have nothing to say." We stared at each other, and he volunteered: "I am not ashamed to look in the mirror when I shave myself." Then: "I am closing the door now."
But he didn't. What ensued instead was a quick bargaining session across the threshold. Recalling a statement released by Mr. Sevan's lawyer last August, that he was used by the U.N. probe as a "scapegoat" to "deflect attention from other, more politically powerful targets," I asked if he might like to share his own version of the events and characters involved in Oil for Food. He replied: "I will write my story one day." I offered to buy him lunch, if he'd like to come out and start telling it now. He declined, saying almost wistfully, "I used to be the one who bought the lunches."
How are the mighty fallen? ... And the corrupt...
Claudia Rosett asks: "How Corrupt Is the UN?" (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Archive/DigitalArchive.aspx?panes=1&aid=12104031_1)
Little of this system is open to any real scrutiny even within the UN, and no single authority outside the UN has proved able to compel any genuine accounting. Moreover, even though there can no longer be any doubt that the scale of the rot is large, the UN’s top management continues to insist
to the contrary. Take the central scandal of recent UN history—namely, Oil-for-Food. Last October, Paul Volcker’s UN-authorized probe into
Oil-for-Food submitted its fifth and final report on that relief program, which in its seven years of operation had become a vehicle for billions in kickbacks,
payoffs, and sanctions-busting arms traffic. By January of this year, after first having declared that he was taking responsibility for the debacle,
Kofi Annan was spinning a different story, telling a London audience that “only one staff member was found to maybe have taken some $150,000 out
of a $64-billion program.
”This was an artful lie. The staff member in question was Benon Sevan, whom Annan had appointed to run Oil-for-Food for six of its seven years. If indeed Sevan took no more than this relative pittance, then Saddam Hussein scored the biggest bargain in the history of kickbacks. According to Senator Norm Coleman’s independent investigation into Oil-for-Food, the real figure for Sevan’s take was $1.2 million. Clearing up this discrepancy is difficult, however, because Sevan, who was allowed by Annan to retire to his native Cyprus on full UN pension, is outside the reach of U.S. law and has denied taking anything.
Read the whole thing ...
al-Canine
04-04-2006, 09:25 AM
Congressmen Grill Swiss Bankers Over Ties to Bin Laden, Iran, Cuba
BY MEGHAN CLYNE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
WASHINGTON - The Swiss banking giant, UBS, may have helped Iran develop its nuclear program, may have held an account for Al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden, and could find itself investigated as part of Congress's ongoing inquiry into the United Nations oil-for-food scandal, lawmakers said yesterday.
read more... (http://www.wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?p=610525#post610525)
UN Sanctions after Oil-For-Food: Still A Viable Diplomatic Tool? (http://reform.house.gov/NSETIR/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=42681)
Congressman Christopher Shays (R-CT), Chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations will convene an oversight hearing to examine the viability of future UN sanctions in light of proposed U.N. management reforms.
Former NJ Senator probed in Oil-for Food. (http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/63958.htm)
Disgraced former New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli is being investigated in connection with allegations he urged Iraq to give a U.S. company lucrative contracts as part of the United Nations' oil-for-food program, it was reported yesterday.
Torricelli - forced to pull out of the 2002 Senate race after it was discovered that he had accepted expensive gifts from campaign contributor David Cheng - is the first U.S. lawmaker linked to the controversial program, The Financial Times reported on its Web site.
Chang was found guilty in 2002 of conspiring to violate federal campaign laws.
The new allegations are based on Iraqi documents that were recovered after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Former UN Chief named in Oil For Food (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2246401,00.html) Scandal.
Saddam Hussein’s regime paid millions of dollars to a South Korean businessman to create a “secret backchannel” to top UN officials, including Boutros Boutros Ghali, then the UN Secretary-General, US prosecutors alleged today.
The claim, formally naming Dr Boutros Ghali for the first time, was made at the start of the first US trial over the UN’s Oil-for-Food scandal.
“Tongsun Park has access at the highest levels of the UN. Tongsun Park had his price. Tongsun Park sold his access to the UN. He sold it to the Iraqis,” Michael Farbiarz, a federal prosecutor, told the jury. “Cash by the bagful was sent to the US and doled out to Tongsun Park by an agent for Iraq.”
And they expect sanctions to work against Iran?
Claudia Rosett is now blogging the Tongsun Park Trial. (http://rosett.nationalreview.com/)
Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.
Claudia Rosett has an UNSCAM Update. (http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008678)
While the United Nations frames its next response to crisis in the Middle East, its last grand venture in that region--Oil for Food--has finally resulted in a guilty verdict in open court. Last Thursday, a high-rolling, globe-trotting South Korean businessman named Tongsun Park was convicted in the Southern District of New York of conspiracy to launder money and act as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
This Global Enron Scandal is a cautionary tale for all those invoking the Moral Authority of the UN.
What else are they silent about? (http://powerlineblog.com/archives/015085.php)
The Swedish Foreign Ministry was delegated to investigate who knew what about corruption in the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq. The report has now been made public by a Swedish radio station. It says that Ole Kolby, Norway's U.N. ambassador at the time and head of the sanctions committee, knew about the program's corruption but "remained quiet for fear of angering Iraq and big companies involved in the program."
Hey Kofi ... About That Mercedes (http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTVjOTlmOGZkZjY1NWM1Nzc3NDY1YjAwODdiZTI1ZGE=)
As preface to a softball question about Kofi’s legacy, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times kidded Kofi, “About that Mercedes...”
Kofi, before speeding right on to the usual platitudes, quipped: “I’ll give you a ride.”
Actually, Kofi has already taken us all for a ride.
After Kofi The Deluge:
“The former head of the United Nation’s oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan, was indicted by a federal grand jury in New York today for allegedly taking $160,000 in bribes. Sevan, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing to ABC News, was accused in the indictment of taking the secret payments from an American businessman, Fred Nadler of New York, who was also indicted. Nadler is the brother-in-law of a former U.N. Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.” TheBlotter - ABC
http://pajamasmedia.com/2007/01/oil_for_food_scandal_oozes_up.php
Claudia Rosett has more. (http://claudiarosett.pajamasmedia.com/2007/01/16/benon_sevan_indicted.php)
Indictments are the new stage in Oil For Food. (http://www.nysun.com/article/46833)
Meanwhile, the indictment demanded the two forfeit nearly $145 million. American assets of the defendants — such as Mr. Nadler's East 60th Street apartment and a house owned by Mr. Sevan in the Hamptons town of East Quogue — may also be subject to forfeiture, according to the indictment.
In a rare move, Mr. Garcia's federal office shared the limelight yesterday with the District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau. "The U.S. Attorney's office and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office have joined forces to uncover and prosecute any corruption or other illegal activities connected to that program," Mr. Morgenthau said.
"It is my hope that during his tenure, Secretary General Ban Kimoon will demand higher standards of integrity from the people who serve the United Nations," the ranking member of the House Foreign Relation Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican of Florida, said in a statement.
A spokesman for Mr. Ban, Farhan Haq, said the United Nations has been cooperating with oil for food investigations, "and will continue to do so." However, he noted that the organization couldn't touch Mr. Sevan's pension fund.
Saddam Hussein was unavailable for comment.
South Korean businessman Sentenced. (http://www.nysun.com/article/49188)
A federal judge in Manhattan yesterday cleared his docket of one oil-for-food case even as he readied his courtroom for another trial stemming from the corrupt U.N.-run program.
In a decision released yesterday afternoon, Judge Denny Chin of U.S. District Court in Manhattan upheld charges by federal prosecutors alleging that a Texas oilman, a British businessman, and others had illegally paid the Iraq government kickbacks for participating in the U.N. oil-for-food program. A trial date has not yet been set.
Later in the day, Judge Chin imposed a relatively strict five-year sentence on an elderly South Korean businessman who last year was the first person to be tried in America on oil for food-related charges.
The jury found that the businessman, Tongsun Park, had served as an unregistered agent on Iraq's behalf as Saddam Hussein sought greater influence over the oil-forfood program. Prosecutors said Park had sold his access to Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali to Iraq for millions of dollars. He was convicted on conspiracy charges.
Claudia Rosett has More. (http://claudiarosett.pajamasmedia.com/2007/02/23/baghdad_bagman_bagged_the_sent.php)
And so we arrive at this curious moment in the Oil-for-Food saga. Tongsun Park, to whom Baghdad paid more than $2.5 million for his role in a conspiracy to convey bribes to the UN, is now doing five years in prison for his crime. We can be grateful to the U.S. system of justice that this much has been done. But one might have supposed that given all Park’s efforts, worth millions to Baghdad in bagman fees alone, there would have been someone at the UN on the receiving end of this particular connection; perhaps someone dining out well tonight on bribe money skimmed from the people of Iraq via a job of high public trust. But no one, not one person, has been named. It’s a funny world.
Indeed ...
Maurice Strong Surfaces. (http://www.feer.com/tales/?p=673)
And China does not have an extradition treaty with the West. How convenient!
THE UN'S SLICK ACCOMPLICE
November 20, 2007 -- Oil giant Chevron faced the music last week for its alleged role in the UN Oil for Food scandal - which may have been the largest embezzlement scheme in human history.
On Wednesday, Chevron agreed to pay $30 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission allegations that it neglected to prevent the payment of illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime as it bought some 78 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil under the UN Oil for Food program in 2001-02.
All told, Saddam used the program - ostensibly designed to relieve the effect of post-Gulf War sanctions on his long-suffering people - to launder more than $20 billion for his own sordid purposes.
And the UN was on the take.
When Baghdad fell in 2003, Coalition forces discovered a list of hundreds of people Saddam had bribed with oil money. Prominent among them: Benon Sevan, the man hand-picked by then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan to oversee Oil for Food.
Annan then stonewalled for almost two years - especially once his son Kojo was fingered in the scandal.
The UN, obviously, would like to consider the matter closed. But the scandal is worth remembering, especially whenever the thugs and tyrants that lead so many member states gather for their annual General Assembly.
Oil for Food revealed a once-venerable institution mired in corruption - and never mind the starving children of Iraq.
"Hypocrisy" is too nice a word.
http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/11202007/postopinion/editorials/the_uns_slick_accomplice_276120.htm
Good governance as usual at Scandal Central. (http://www.nypost.com/seven/07182008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/scandal_central_120413.htm?page=2)
When Ban Ki-Moon took charge as UN secretary-general in January 2007, he promised a new era of better governance. On his UN Web site, he declares that he'll "make transparency and accountability the cornerstone of my tenure."
That cornerstone is looking more like a pebble on the UN lawn in the wake of the "cash for Kim" scandal that's unfolded on Ban's watch. It turned out that a parade of staffers working in North Korea at the UN's flagship agency, the UN Development Program, had violated UN rules for years by transferring millions of dollars to the rogue regime of Kim Jong Il.
The only person penalized in that scandal was the whistleblower: Artjon Shkurtaj found himself out of a job, with the UNDP denying him even the compensation urged by the UN's own Ethics Office.
"Reformer" Ban did nothing in that case, blaming a lack of jurisdiction within the UN's labyrinthine empire. Nor has he piped up about the Bertucci case, although he chairs the UN management team, of which Bertucci's report-burying boss, Sha Zukang, is a member.
Queried by e-mail about the status of the Bertucci report, Sha refused to comment, sending only a message via his office assistant: "Be assured that accountability is high on the management agenda . . ."
Reached by phone on Wednesday, Bertucci himself said he is innocent and that if anything he has done is a crime, then "maybe every single manager of the UN should be indicted."
Now there's a thought ...
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