Oil-for-Food Scandal

Maybe start all over, as was done with the League of Nations…

If indeed there is an attempt to fix it, it needs to be a huge shakeup and housecleaning.

Feckless on Iraq, useless in Sudan…

It’s good to have a forum for international discussion, but there needs to be recognition of a mission, and just what the U.N. should do and can succeed in doing, and what it should not do.

I think the idea was nice, but the current reality is that it is all but useless. Whatever edicts or pronouncements it might make are simply ignored by all those opposed.

Perhaps it has value as a method of coordinating humanitarian aid or peace programs? If it is never going to have the power to enforce any of its pronouncements, maybe it would be better to retask it.

How is that for a surprising attitude from an “ultra-liberal”…

Wow vroom, I have really penetrated your psyche. I like that :slight_smile:

[quote]vroom wrote:
I think the idea was nice, but the current reality is that it is all but useless. Whatever edicts or pronouncements it might make are simply ignored by all those opposed.

Perhaps it has value as a method of coordinating humanitarian aid or peace programs? If it is never going to have the power to enforce any of its pronouncements, maybe it would be better to retask it.

How is that for a surprising attitude from an “ultra-liberal”…[/quote]

I think coordinating humanitarian aid is a great mission for the U.N.

I look at the UN, and I see what was so much potential, ruined by corruption. I still don?t know why people want us to treat it like it is the world government. That is just scary.

It looks as if the estimates of UN skimming was way low. It has been thought that the UN and its accomplices were on the hook for up to $11 billion. Reports yesterday (Friday ) now put the bilking at somewhere well over $21 billion.

Kofi Annan should be executed for aiding abetting terrorist activity.

I agree with vroom - the UN is a sham, and should be dissolved. I don’t really even know how effective it would be as the administrators of humanitarian aid.

Some good perspective from William Safire:

U.N. Obstructs Justice
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

Published: November 15, 2004

Washington ? “I’m angry that we find the U.N. proactively interfering with our investigation,” Senator Norm Coleman, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, informed Lou Dobbs on CNN, “by telling certain folks not to cooperate with us.” He repeated for emphasis his sharp response to Secretary General Kofi Annan’s “interfering with our ability to get information we need” about the oil-for-food scandal.

Judith Miller of The Times had revealed that the Minnesota Republican, joined by ranking Democrat Carl Levin, sent a letter noting Annan’s four-month foot-dragging and that “the U.N. is hindering our efforts to obtain relevant documents.”

If legislative investigators were prosecutors, the name of the game Annan and his enablers are playing would be called “obstruction of justice.”

The principal investigating body of the Senate is not helpless. Today witnesses from Treasury and C.I.A., as well as its own investigators, will present evidence that the huge rip-off engineered by Saddam Hussein - with the connivance of corrupt U.N. officials and companies protected by Security Council members like Russia and France - was even greater than the $10 billion figure estimated by our G.A.O. Going back to 1991 and including the predecessor to oil-for-food, an outside source tells me that the U.N.-maladministered profiteering reached $23 billion. Such heavy spending affects U.N. votes.

The Senate, as it returns to lame-duck work this week, will subpoena evidence through the U. S. connections of companies like Lloyd’s Register Inspection Ltd., which Annan’s consultant, Paul Volcker, has so far “proactively” kept from cooperating. And there is the budget option: if the U.N. persists in obstruction, the U.S. can re-examine its contribution to an unaccountable organization.

But the Congress is not dependent on one Senate committee alone. In the House, Henry Hyde’s International Relations Committee is holding hearings Wednesday. Though there will be overlap - Charles Duelfer will be busy explicating the oil-for-food section of his C.I.A. report this week - its emphasis has been on following the illicit money through the banking system.

BNP Paribas, the European bank eager to expand in the U.S., has cooperated with “friendly subpoenas” that Annan’s aides could not stop through their “gag letters”; its present and past officials will testify about its thousands of letters of credit. But what about “know your customer” rules? What did our Federal Reserve officials know about sloppy banking procedures, and how long did it take for those regulators to put suspect banks under supervising action? The Fed’s Herbert Biern may have some explaining to do about the failure of financial and diplomatic oversight.

If the U.N. stonewalling continues this week, Chairman Hyde’s patience could at last wear thin; as former chairman of Judiciary, he knows something about criminal referrals. Such an action directed at recalcitrant bankers, brokers or U.N. inspection contractors would at last get high-level attention at the Justice Department, where U.S. attorneys have been tediously poking around U.S. oil companies for leads on kickbacks.

Kofi Annan’s longtime right-hand man, Benon Sevan, headed the U.N.'s Office of the Iraq Program; he has been retired but has been vociferously denying wrongdoing ever since his name appeared on a list of beneficiaries of Saddam’s largesse in the form of vouchers for oil deals.

Annan’s obstruction of outside investigations has strong support within the U.N. members whose citizens are most likely to be embarrassed by revelations of payoffs: Russia, France and China lead all the rest. He has dutifully continued to align himself with their interests by declaring the overthrow of Saddam “illegal” and recently denouncing our attack on the insurgents in Falluja. Perhaps he thinks that this confluence of national interest in cover-up - along with the unwillingness of most media to dig into a complicated story - will let his stonewalling succeed. He reckons not with an insulted Congress.

Sad to see is the secretary general’s manipulative abuse of Paul Volcker. Here is a former central banker so confident of his hard-earned reputation for integrity that he cannot see how it is being shredded by a web of sticky-fingered officials and see-no-evil bureaucrats desperate to protect the man on top who hired him to substitute for - and thereby to abort - prompt and truly independent investigation.

Pursuant to [EDIT: rainjack’s] point above:

Hussein Reaped
$21.3 Billion Gain,
Senate Estimates

By JESS BRAVIN and STEVE STECKLOW
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 16, 2004; Page A3

Saddam Hussein reaped an estimated $21.3 billion in illegal revenue during the 12-year life of United Nations economic sanctions, Senate investigators said at a hearing yesterday, through a variety of maneuvers ranging from kickbacks extracted from oil exporters to interest earned on illicit income stashed in overseas bank accounts.

The amount dwarfs previous estimates of the deposed Iraqi dictator’s malfeasance, and includes categories not considered in prior reports on the Hussein regime’s efforts to evade international sanctions. The estimates from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations include Iraqi proceeds from 1991, when the U.N. Security Council imposed sanctions to punish Baghdad for its invasion of Kuwait, through the establishment of the U.N.-run Oil-for-Food Program in 1996, which ended with the U.S.-led overthrow of the Hussein regime last year.

In addition to the Iraqi regime’s illegal surcharges on oil sales, reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2002, Senate investigators counted additional ways of profiteering, such as the substitution of substandard goods for those specified in U.N. contracts, with the Hussein regime pocketing the difference.

In April, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the Hussein regime had skimmed $10.1 billion during the Oil-for-Food Program of 1997-2002. In September, Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, put the figure of illicit revenue over the sanctions’ life at more than $11 billion. With each investigation using its own methodology and different data, the numbers don’t always square.

The sanctions succeeded in blocking the Hussein regime from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and left the Iraqi military a shell of its former power, U.S. investigators have concluded. But particularly after the creation of the oil-for-food program, Mr. Hussein found ways to strengthen his grip on power while orchestrating a campaign aiming to bring an eventual end to the embargo.

Sen. Norm Coleman, the Minnesota Republican who heads the investigations subcommittee, said the $21.3 billion was “an evolving figure” that could increase as further information becomes available. At the U.N., spokesman Fred Eckhard said officials were studying the report but had no comment. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has appointed his own independent panel, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, to probe Oil-for-Food, and additional investigations are underway by other congressional committees and a federal grand jury in New York.

The Senate report adds detail to previous accounts of corruption, including documents purporting to show how the dictator issued so-called oil vouchers, which entitled the recipient to buy a quantity of Iraqi oil, to favored politicians, journalists and organizations overseas. Recipients would sell the vouchers to oil companies or other middlemen and receive a percentage of the sale. Other documents unearthed by investigators reveal how suppliers inflated contract prices so that the Hussein regime could skim the difference.

Senate investigators said they couldn’t add new detail to some of the most provocative allegations in the scandal, including the appearance of Benon Sevan, the U.N. official who headed the Oil-for-Food Program, on the Hussein government’s list of oil voucher recipients. Mr. Sevan has denied wrongdoing but has failed so far to cooperate with congressional probes.

The panel’s senior Democrat, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, noted that the current and previous administrations acquiesced in the flouting of sanctions by two regional U.S. allies, Jordan and Turkey. According to the Duelfer report, over the life of U.N. sanctions Iraq reaped $4.4 billion through illicit trade protocols with Jordan and $710 billion with Turkey.

Steven Groves, an attorney for the subcommittee, pointed to Weir Group PLC, a large engineering company based in Scotland, as a case study in how Iraqi kickbacks worked, saying in prepared testimony, “Weir is not the type of company one would normally associate with shady Iraqi middlemen or with secret Swiss bank accounts. Yet that is what occurred here.”

Weir deposited more than $8 million in a secret Swiss bank account controlled by the former Iraqi regime as part of an elaborate kickback scheme, according to testimony at the hearing. Weir, which did more than $80 million of business under the oil-for-food program, announced in July it had made ?4.2 million ($7.8 million) in “payments in addition to normal commissions” for 15 contracts and that it “cannot rule out the possibility that sums may have been returned to Iraq.”

Weir, which conducted its own investigation, has previously said it took “appropriate” internal disciplinary action. A spokesman yesterday said it provided information to the subcommittee and “we do not think it would be appropriate for us to comment further.”

According to the testimony, Weir provided parts for oil, water and sewer projects under the oil-for-food program. In June 2000, the Iraqis told a Weir sales representative the company would receive no future contracts “unless the contract price was inflated by 10% and that the additional amount would be paid back to Iraq.” Weir agreed, the testimony stated, and was told to deposit the kickbacks in an account at Banque Safdi? in Geneva, outside the U.N. program. The bank didn’t respond yesterday to a request to comment.

“For the remainder of the Oil-for-Food Program, each of Weir’s 15 contracts were inflated between 11% and 14% and Weir deposited the inflated amount into a bank account in Geneva in the name of ‘Corsin Financial Ltd.’ – a company that has no existence other than being the holder of that bank account,” the testimony stated.

Mr. Groves’s testimony shows that in one contract in 2001, Weir originally made a tender offer of ?2.16 million ($2.8 million) to supply parts. After the Iraqis demanded a kickback – in this case, 13% – Weir increased the cost of each part 10%, increased the number of parts and revised the offer to ?2.44 million, which the Iraqis then accepted. Weir then submitted the contract to the U.N., which approved it, and the goods were shipped from Scotland to Iraq.

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com and Steve Stecklow at steve.stecklow@wsj.com

Is Paul Volcker’s(sp) “investigation” anything but a dog and pony show? He has a $20 million budget to “investigate” the U.N.'s O.F.F. activity. Guess where his $20 million is coming from? O.F.F. funds.

At what point does the U.S. call bullshit and take away the U.N.'s allowance?

If Kofi was to resign - there is talk that Slick Willy wants his job. Would we be any better off with Clinton in there? Rumor has it that the French really like Clinton.

I don’t know if Volcker’s investigation will yield dividends or whether the U.N. is guiding – I won’t trust anything about it until they release the records of the transactions, which are hardly matters of high security…

Come Clean, Kofi
The U.N. secretary-general ducks responsibilty for the Oil for Food scam.

BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, November 17, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

With estimates soaring of graft and fraud under the United Nations Oil for Food program in Iraq, we are hearing a lot about the need to “get to the bottom” of this scandal, the biggest ever to hit the U.N. To get to that bottom will need a much harder look at the top–where Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself resides.

That violates all sorts of taboos. But so, one might suppose, does a United Nations that allowed Saddam Hussein to embezzle at least $21.3 billion in oil money during 12 years, with the great bulk of that sum–a staggering $17.3 billion–pilfered between 1997-2003, on Mr. Annan’s watch.

These are the record-breaking new estimates released Monday by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose staffers, despite Mr. Annan’s refusal to cooperate, have spent the past seven months voyaging deep into the muck of Oil for Food. At a hearing Monday, these investigators surfaced to tell us the theft and fraud under Oil for Food was at least twice as bad as earlier reports had suggested, and that all this is just a preview of yet more appalling disclosures they expect to release early next year. Sen. Norm Coleman, the subcommittee’s chairman, underscored the urgency of such investigations, noting not only that the size of the fraud “is staggering,” but that some of Saddam’s vast illicit stash might right now be funding terrorists and costing American lives.

Mr. Annan, by contrast, seems to inhabit a different universe–one in which the chief problem lies not in the U.N.'s complicity, including his own, in the biggest fraud in the history of humanitarian relief, but rather in the attempts to shine any light on all that sleaze. In Annan Land, there was earlier this year no need for any probe into Oil for Food; and even now there is no need for any investigating beyond the U.N.'s own “independent inquiry” into itself, led by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, required to funnel its findings first through Mr. Annan, funded to the tune of $30 million out of one of the old Oil for Food accounts it is supposed to be investigating, and not planning to clock in with any specific results until sometime next summer.

In the spirit of shooting the messenger, Mr. Annan has complained often in recent months about criticism of Oil for Food, denouncing it as a “campaign” that has “hurt the U.N.” Monday’s Oil for Food hearing evoked from Mr. Annan’s spokesman, Fred Eckhard, the comment that Mr. Annan feels he has been “misjudged by certain media” and that Mr. Annan is “not being obstructionist” in his refusal to cooperate with congressional investigators. We are given to understand that Mr. Annan would help if he could, but his job entails so many over-riding responsibilities.

OK, except that when it comes to Oil for Food, Mr. Annan has labored hard in recent months to disavow his own large role and responsibilities. From both Mr. Annan and the entourage of U.N. speechwriters and spokesman who report to him have come a long series of disclaimers and protests, eye-catching less for what they tell us than for what they leave out.

Just last week, we had Mr. Annan’s director of communications, Edward Mortimer, asserting in a letter to The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Annan was “not involved” in designing Oil for Food. Technically, it may be correct that Mr. Annan did not actually seal the original deal. But Mr. Annan’s own official U.N. biography states that before becoming secretary-general, he “led the first United Nations team negotiating with Iraq on the sale of oil to fund purchases of humanitarian aid”–and that implies a certain familiarity with the origins of Oil for Food.

Once Mr. Annan became secretary-general, he lost little time in getting deeply involved with Oil for Food. In October 1997, just 10 months into the job, he transformed what had begun as an ad hoc, temporary relief measure into the Office of the Iraq Program, an entrenched U.N. department, which reported to him directly–and was eliminated only after the U.S.-led coalition, against Mr. Annan’s wishes, deposed Saddam. To run Oil for Food, Mr. Annan picked Benon Sevan (now alleged to have received oil money from Saddam, which he denies) and kept him there until the program ended about six years later.

Mr. Annan’s reorganization of Oil for Food meant a nontrivial change in the trajectory of the program. All the signs are that Saddam immediately took the cue that he could now start gaming the program with impunity–and Mr. Annan did not prove him wrong. Within the month, Saddam had created the first crisis over the U.N. weapons inspectors, who were supposed to be part of the sanctions and Oil for Food package. Mr. Annan’s response was not to throttle back on Oil for Food but to go before the Security Council a few months later and urge that Baghdad be allowed to import oil equipment along with the food and medicine to which the program had been initially limited. This set the stage for the ensuing burst in Saddam’s oil production, kickbacks, surcharges and smuggling.

Mr. Annan then flew to Baghdad for a private powwow with Saddam and returned to declare that this was a man he could do business with. The weapons inspectors returned to Iraq for a short spell, but by the end of 1998, Saddam had evicted them for the next four years. Mr. Annan, however, went right on doing business. And big business it was, however humanitarian in name. Under the Oil for Food deal, Mr. Annan’s Secretariat pulled in a 2.2% commission on Saddam’s oil sales, totaling a whopping $1.4 billion over the life of the program, to cover the costs of supervising Saddam. Yet somehow the Secretariat never found the funding to fully meter oil shipments, ensure full inspections of all goods entering Iraq, or catch the pricing scams that by the new estimates of Senate investigators let Saddam rake in $4.4 billion in kickbacks on relief contracts.

Mr. Annan and his aides would also have us believe that Oil for Food had nothing to do with Saddam’s smuggling of oil–which generated the lion’s share of his illicit income. But it was only after Oil for Food geared up that Saddam’s oil smuggling really took off, totaling $13.6 billion during his entire 12 years between wars, but with more than two-thirds of that–an estimated $9.7 billion–earned during the era of Oil for Food. Those were precisely the years in which Mr. Annan repeatedly went to bat to enable Saddam, under Oil for Food, to import the equipment to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure, whence came all that smuggled oil.

Transparency from the start might have flagged the world and stopped the scams as things turned deeply rotten under Oil for Food. But Mr. Annan’s policy to this day has been secrecy. On Monday, Sen. Coleman summed up his subcommittee’s efforts to get at the truth, as having required so far, eight subpoenas, 13 chairman’s letters, “numerous interviews with key participants, and receipt of over a million pages of evidence” to begin to understand “the behind-the-scenes machinations of the participants in the Oil for Food program.”

“Participants” are generally understood to have been Saddam’s chosen contractors. But we need to recognize that one of the biggest of those contractors was, in effect, the U.N. itself. As Oil for Food was not only designed but expanded, embellished upon and run for more than six years under Mr. Annan’s stewardship, it became not so much a supervisory operation, but a business deal with Saddam, in which the U.N. in effect provided money laundering services, the Secretariat collected a percentage fee from Saddam–and somewhere in there, between the kickbacks, surcharges, importation of oil equipment and smuggling out of oil, they jointly ran a storefront relief operation.

Who at the U.N. took illicit money from Saddam–if, indeed, anyone did–is an important question, and worth pursuing. But so is the matter of who covered up for Saddam; who pushed to continue and expand a program so derelict that it failed to nab more than $17 billion in illicit deals, and so secretive that investigators have spent much of the past year trying simply to get their hands on information the U.N. should have made public at the time. It is worth asking whose welfare was enhanced, whose domain was expanded, whose coffers filled with $1.4 billion delivered as a percentage cut of Saddam’s oil revenues–and who has failed to this day to take on board the thumping lessons about the need for transparency at the U.N.

That would be Mr. Annan. He is not protecting the U.N. At great cost to whatever noble aspirations the U.N. once had, and to all societies that value integrity over Potemkin institutions, he is protecting himself.

Ms. Rosett is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.

Lest anyone think the U.N.'s problems are only related to the Oil-for-Bribery/Terror fiasco, some more good news for Mr. Annan:

UN: 150 Sex Abuse Charges in Congo Peacekeeping

Mon Nov 22, 8:43 PM ET

By Evelyn Leopold

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations (news - web sites) is investigating about 150 allegations of sexual abuse by U.N. civilian staff and soldiers in the Congo, some of them recorded on videotape, a senior U.N. official said on Monday.

The accusations include pedophilia, rape and prostitution, said Jane Holl Lute, an assistant secretary-general in the peacekeeping department.

Lute, an American, said there was photographic and video evidence for some of the allegations and most of the charges came to light since the spring.

“We are shining a light on this problem in order to determine its scope, and we will not stop there,” Lute told a news conference.

She did not say if 150 different people were involved but indicated some suspects committed more than one offense.

In May the United Nations reported some 30 cases of abuse among peacekeepers in the northeastern town of Bunia, where half of the more than 10,000 soldiers are stationed.

Last month, one French soldier and two Tunisian soldiers were sent home, U.N. officials said. Three U.N. civilian staff were suspended.

The United Nations has jurisdiction over its civilian staff but troops are contributed by individual nations. Consequently, the world body has only the power to demand a specific country repatriate an accused soldier and punish him or her at home.

Jean-Marie Guehenno, the U.N. undersecretary-general for peacekeeping, went to the sprawling central African country, formally called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, last month. He has promised an overhaul of staff discipline.

REPORT ON ABUSE

The U.N. internal oversight office is expected to release a report soon on the abuse in Bunia. In addition, the peacekeeping department is sending at least two other teams to Congo to deal with various aspects of the problem, Lute said.

Also visiting the Congo within the past month was Jordan’s U.N. ambassador, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, who serves as a special adviser on sexual exploitation. One of his tasks is to persuade governments to act on charges against their soldiers.

The prince, a former military man, served as a political affairs officer for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, from 1994 to 1996.

The United Nations mission in the Congo has some 10,800 peacekeepers and some 60 civilian staff, led by American diplomat William Lacy Swing.

The revelations of peacekeeping abuses is usually kept quiet at the United Nations until reporters or individual countries disclose the news, as happened in Cambodia in the early 1990s and later in Somalia, Bosnia and Ethiopia. But in this case the world body released some details.

Annan on Friday expressed outrage at the abuse, saying, “I am afraid there is clear evidence that acts of gross misconduct have taken place.”

“This is a shameful thing for the United Nations to have to say, and I am absolutely outraged by it,” he said while in Tanzania where Guehenno briefed him.

Annan said the allegations concerned a small number of U.N. personnel and promised to hold those involved accountable.

“I have long made it clear that my attitude to sexual exploitation and abuse is one of zero tolerance, without exception, and I am determined to implement this policy in the most transparent manner,” Annan said.

And Oil-for-Terror looks worse and worse as each new fact comes out:

Wall Street Journal Editorial

Oil for Terrorism
November 23, 2004; Page A18

Last week certainly was instructive about the epic corruption scheme once known as the United Nations Oil for Food program.

First came Monday’s hearings in Norm Coleman’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations where we learned that Saddam Hussein gamed the program for twice as much unmonitored revenue as previously thought – $21.3 billion, up from $10 billion. Also fascinating was chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer’s testimony that he believes, based on what high-level Iraqi sources have told him, that U.N. Oil for Food director Benon Sevan did in fact profit from Iraqi oil vouchers. Mr. Sevan continues to deny the allegation.

Then on Wednesday Henry Hyde’s House International Relations Committee held hearings revealing how some of the money financed terrorism. Specifically, some of the kickbacks paid by oil buyers and humanitarian goods suppliers ended up in an account at the Rafidain Bank in Amman, Jordan, from whence cash was funneled by the Iraqi ambassador there to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Saddam also gave oil vouchers to Abu Abbas, the man responsible for the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and the murder of American Leon Klinghoffer. Maybe now the part of our foreign policy establishment that continues to deny that Saddam supported terrorism will pipe down.

Perhaps the biggest news of all is that investigators are finally starting to crack the secrets held by the French bank BNP Paribas, which administered Oil for Food’s official accounts and may prove to be the Rosetta stone for deciphering program-related wrongdoing. The House heard how federal investigators looked at a sample of 80 transactions and found three cases in which money was paid out to someone other than the original designee in the letter of credit.

The bank denies wrongdoing, but there is an issue of whether it violated U.S. “know your customer” laws. Certainly it will be fascinating to discover who was really at the final receiving end of some of these Saddam allocations. And if that rate of irregularity pans out over the 50,000 or so transactions that BNP handled for Oil for Food, estimates of the revenue Saddam was able to accrue and spend without monitoring are sure to grow still higher.

We’ve speculated before that discomfort at the possible airing of this information played a big role as such Security Council members as France and Russia considered whether to back the U.S. decision to use force in Iraq. We wonder if similar agitation isn’t now playing a role in French President Jacques Chirac’s increasingly anti-American rhetoric. Fortunately BNP is chartered in the state of New York and subject to U.S. banking laws, so investigators are likely to crack this nut eventually. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is among others with subpoena power looking at the bank.

Finally, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who’s heading up the U.N.'s own official Oil for Food probe, has now promised an interim report by January. Sources familiar with his investigation tell us he’s been having trouble getting cooperation from Russia, which was by far Saddam’s largest business partner under Oil for Food, and has appealed as high as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office for assistance. So far none has been forthcoming.

One thing that might help is for the White House to drop the ambivalence it has so far displayed about whether it really wants the details of this scandal to come out. Some insiders are worried that a full investigation might reduce U.N. cooperation in Iraq, as if that help has been vital so far. The real issue, after all, isn’t the possibility of small-time greed by U.N. officials but the viability of the whole organization given the vulnerability of its member states to corruption and blackmail.

The sooner we get answers the sooner we can get on with thinking about possible reforms and improvements. Surely everyone who really believes in constructive international cooperation – as opposed to “multilateralism” for its own sake – will welcome that prospect.

Is it any real surprise that the U.N. is not cooperating with the U.S. with this investigation? Also, since there were several U.S. companies contributing to this atrocity, shouldn’t they be held accountable as well?

[quote]ALDurr wrote:
Is it any real surprise that the U.N. is not cooperating with the U.S. with this investigation? Also, since there were several U.S. companies contributing to this atrocity, shouldn’t they be held accountable as well?[/quote]

  1. No, it’s not. It is not at all surprising that they would not want the details of this to get out. But they have no apparent reason not to cooperate other than to cover their own tracks.

  2. Yes. Each bad actor should be held accountable to the level of its [or his] bad acts. This would put the U.S. companies pretty far down on the totem pole, but they should not get off if they did indeed commit bad acts. The rottenness is very much at the top, however, and the focus is appropriately there for the time being.

Looks as if even the U.N. staff is getting fed up with the malfeasance at the top:

Staff revolt gathers pace at UN
James Bone in New York reports
Protest against top management is an embarrassment for Kofi Annan

KOFI ANNAN?s top managers at the United Nations are facing a staff revolt that has gathered pace since the bombing of the UN office in Baghdad.

Staff representatives adopted a resolution yesterday criticising senior management after a string of clashes during the past year with their bosses at UN headquarters. The rebellion is an embarrassment for Mr Annan, and comes as he faces intense criticism for corruption in the UN?s ?Oil-for-Food? programme in Saddam Hussein?s Iraq.

The UN chief suffered another blow yesterday when he was forced to admit that civilian and peacekeeping personnel on UN duty in Congo had committed acts of gross misconduct.

Officials plan to make public on Monday the lurid results of their investigation into UN officials having sex with under-age local girls. Responding to staff complaints yesterday, the UN managers offered to hold talks next week with the elected president of the UN staff union, which represents thousands of UN workers and around the world.

Mr Annan will be travelling in Africa ? first to the Iraq summit in Egypt and then to a Francophone meeting in Burkina Faso. But his chief of staff will try to defuse the tension by meeting with the staff union?s president, Rosemarie Waters.

?The idea is to keep dialogue going and see if we can sort out our differences so that it isn?t necessary to adopt resolutions saying they have no confidence in senior management,? Fred Eckhard, the UN spokesman, said. ?We certainly like them to have more confidence in us and we hope we can achieve that through dialogue.?

Ms Waters drew a clear distinction between Mr Annan and his senior managers, with whom the staff union has clashed. ?We have utmost confidence in our secretary-general,? she said. ?He is a gentleman in a difficult situation in a difficult job, but he is doing the best he can.?

Frustration has been growing since the bombing of the UN?s Baghdad compound last year, which killed 22 people, including the UN special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello. But anger has erupted over the outcome of recent investigations into allegations of misconduct by top managers in the UN system.

First Mr Annan overruled the findings of an inquiry into groping charges against the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, a former Dutch Prime Minister. Mr Annan said the allegation that Mr Lubbers groped a 51-year-old female employee could not be substantiated. The woman has since dropped her complaint.

Then came the latest dispute, triggering yesterday?s vote, involving Dileep Nair, the Singaporean who serves as the UN?s anti-corruption watchdog.

The staff council called this year for an investigation of Mr Nair, the UN under-secretary for internal oversight services, after an anonymous letter accused him of trading promotions for money and sexual favours. Mr Annan announced last week that the investigation by the UN?s chief manager, Catherine Bertini, had exonerated Mr Nair.

But the staff union was furious that it had not been consulted by the investigators. ?Throughout the six months duration of the investigation, despite being the complainant in this matter, the staff committee was neither informed that an investigation was taking place nor asked to clarify its concerns or provide testimony,? the staff union said yesterday. Its resolution said: ?The staff council notes with great concern the trend of exonerating senior management officials in a series of violations further eroding the confidence of the staff in the senior management.?

The debate also revived other concerns of UN staff. An early draft of the resolution criticised Mr Annan for refusing to accept the offered resignation of his Canadian deputy, Louise Frechette, over security lapses before the Baghdad bombing.

It also said that Iqbal Riza, the chief of staff, should be brought to account for alleged nepotism because his son works for the UN in Lebanon.

Thoughts on the UN from a weblog of Republican-leaning career state department folks – I think the U.N. is beyond saving, at least as some sort of supra-national policy-setting organization. It could do fine, with a little work, as a humanitarian aid organization.

http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/2004/11/seeing-un-plain-corruption-as-way-of.html

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Seeing the UN Plain: Corruption as a Way of Life

Ah, yes, the United Nations.

As school kids we all heard the UN described as “the last best hope of mankind” and “if it hadn’t been invented it would need to be.” Even now as adults we hear calls for “sending” in the UN; getting UN approval; the need to “work with the UN”; and praise for its “technical and relief agencies.” On its official website, the UN modestly states, “United Nations. It’s Your World.”

We at The Diplomad are here to ask you to forget all that misty-eyed blather. Our Diplomads have served at the UN, in New York, Vienna and Geneva, and worked with the UN in a variety of other posts, and can tell you from experience that the UN is a massive, expensive hoax that needs to be ended once and for all.

Those who don’t rely on the “elite” MSM for all their information, know about the UN’s “oil-for-food” scam that is slowly being uncovered, and could prove the most massive financial scandal in human history (even bigger than Massachusetts’ “Big Dig.”) The “oil-for-food” scam, huge as it is, flows logically from the ruling ethos at the UN. The UN system is built on corruption, on the principle of the shake-down; whatever lofty objectives might have existed at its creation, for the UN corruption now provides the means and reason to exist.

Let us explain.

The UN as an institution is the purest of pure bureaucracy: it is the thirty-year single malt of bureaucracies. We refer you to the UN website for details on careers there, but suffice it to say that if you want a job that is VERY well-paying, has lots of perks (first class travel; a generous pension; right to retire almost anywhere you want; tax free), and involves little actual work, the UN bureaucracy is for you – unfortunately, if you’re an American (or Israeli) you’ll have a hard time getting it given the solid anti-Americanism (and anti-Semitism) of the UN Secretariat. The UN bureaucracy must have served as inspiration for a sci-fi story we vaguely recall about an ancient civilization that builds an elobrate machine that continues to operate even after the civilization itself has died. Subsequent generations – in this case, in Europe and the boardroom of the NY Times – have no idea what the machine does, but don’t tamper with it, and, in fact, begin to worship it.

Well, we know the secret of the UN bureaucracy machine. It exists to exist. To do that it has going one of the best scams imaginable. While most media and ordinary folks focus on the occasionally contentious UNSC resolutions and debates on Iraq or Iran, in fact, 99% of UN “work” has nothing to do with such high-visibility issues. No, it deals with scores, hundreds, in fact, of resolutions passed every year in the UN General Assembly, its main Committees, and in bodies such as the Human Rights Commission. It lives off those resolutions.

Slightly simplified, this is how it often works. A UN bureaucrat gets hold of a delegate from a sympathetic country and gets that country’s delegation to propose some often innocuous sounding resolution – let’s make up a typical one right here, “The Effect of Deforestation on the Development of Sub-Saharan Africa.” It will have a few bland paragraphs expressing concern about deforestation in Africa, note the impact it has on the livelihood of Africans especially the “most vulnerable sectors of the population,” and then will have a little paragraph at the end calling on the Secretary General to submit a report to the next General Assembly on the impact of deforestation in Africa. Normally such a resolution gets adopted by consensus by the appropriate committee, and then goes to the UNGA where its hammered through ASAP. Under the Reagan Administration, the US delegation made a specialty of finding these little gems and trying to kill them or at least make clear that they would not pass by consensus. That is tough and frustrating work; it takes up incredible amounts of time and effort and burns up lots of political capital. Such efforts offend the MSM, powerful US NGOs and other lobby groups. The UN bureaucracy knows that at most only the US will fight these resolutions; the UN uses its allies in the MSM and the NGO “community” to savage the US and make the US look uncaring about deforestation and poverty, etc. As a result, often the US will back off as the politicial costs are seen as too great to be alone and on the “wrong” side of such an issue.

So the resolution passes. The UN bureaucracy gets tasked with writing a report. Usually these reports are short, based on pre-existing information that in the age of the internet would take an intern a couple of hours to put together, but, nevertheless, for some odd reason seem to require lots of travel by UN bureaucrats. The report will conclude that there is need for further study of this critical topic and might perhaps recommend the holding of a special conference or meeting on the topic. It goes to the next UNGA which agrees that further work is needed and asks the UN Secretariat to go ahead and provide another report to the next UNGA, and so on and on. The topic is now firmly embedded in the UN agenda – almost impossible to remove – and highly paid bureaucrats now have sinecures producing endless reports calling for more reports and conferences that will call for more reports and conferences. The US and a handful of other major donors pay for all this.

Sweet. Very sweet.

Even the much praised UN technical agencies, such as those dealing with refugees, are bastions of waste and corruption. No need here to discuss the disaster that is called UNRWA and what it has done to set back peace in he Middle East for nearly 55 years, all the while providing lucrative employment for generations of UN bureaucrats. The much-ballyhooed UN Development Programme (Note: Although the USA pays the lion’s share, the UN uses British spellings) likewise is hugely expensive, over-staffed, painfully slow in delivering meaningful assistance, and rife with anti-Americanism. These programs [or, if you prefer, programmes] generate a blizzard of statistics showing that everything, everywhere is getting worse all the time, and desperately requiring more money for more UN programs and agencies.

The American taxpayer is getting ripped off in a big way by the UN. The “need” to play the UN’s political games damages the US ability to act forcefully in its own interests. If the UN wants to stay in New York and frequent the bad restaurants and bars that have sprung up around UN HQS, that’s fine – but not with US tax money.

It’s time for the US and other serious countries (e.g., Australia, Israel) to get out of the UN.

We will explore more of the themes we have touched upon above in subsequent postings.

Nice summary of the latest in the Oil-for-Terrorism debacle at the U.N. courtesy of “wretchard” at the Belmont Club – some good old-fashioned self-interested transactions for Kofi Annan’s son… Seems as if the blanket-denial strategy the U.N. has utilized to this point isn’t working – now maybe they should open themselves up to some of that press scrutiny we’ve been discussing on other threads…

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/11/beat-goes-on-new-york-sun-claudia.html

Saturday, November 27, 2004
The Beat Goes On

New York Sun

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=285035

Nov 26, 2004 ? By Irwin Arieff  UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The son of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan got monthly payments more than four years longer than was previously known from a Swiss firm that won a lucrative contract under the scandal-ridden U.N. oil-for-food program, the United Nations said on Friday.

Kojo Annan, the U.N. leader's son, was paid $2,500 monthly ? a total of $125,000 ? by Geneva-based Cotecna from the beginning of 2000 through last February, as part of an agreement not to compete with Cotecna in West Africa after he left the firm, U.N. chief spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

Associated Press

"There is nothing illegal in this," Eckhard said of the payments from the Swiss firm Cotecna. However, it was an embarrassing moment for the United Nations to have to admit that its earlier information was wrong. Eckhard said that Kojo Annan's attorney told him that the younger Annan "continued to receive monthly payments beyond the end of 1999, when we previously thought they had ceased, through February 2004." Eckhard acknowledged that the United Nations previously said that Annan had stopped receiving monthly payments at the end of 1999.

CBC News

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2004/11/26/kojo-annan-un-041126.html

Annan's lawyers say he was paid as part of an open-ended agreement that he wouldn't set up a competing business after he stopped working for the company in 1998. Cotecna was contracted to ensure the delivery of goods Iraq bought through a UN-brokered arrangement that ran from 1996 to this autumn. The program let leader Saddam Hussein trade $46 billion US worth of Iraqi oil for food and other essential items the country couldn't acquire itself because of international sanctions.

UPI

U.N.chief returns to HQ for Iraq biz -- United Nations, United States, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan Thursday left Africa to return to U.N. World Headquarters in New York to deal with the situation in Iraq. A U.N. official at headquarters told United Press International he was leaving Burkina-Faso without attending a meeting of French-speaking nations as originally planned. She said it was not yet known if he would come into his office Friday. The official had no further details of why Annan was cutting short his overseas trip. Chief U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard Wednesday told reporters in New York Annan was considering curtailing his program "to deal with pressing business here."

This is the least response I think we can expect from Oil-for-Terror – and a nice choice for the replacement, too.

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed

Time for a Kofi Break

By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
November 29, 2004; Page A14

Things are going badly for Kofi Annan. The oil-for-food scandal has revealed U.N. behavior regarding Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that ranges from criminally inept to outright corrupt. Rape and pedophilia by U.N. peacekeepers haven’t gotten the kind of attention they’d get if American troops were involved, but the scandals have begun to take their toll. And the U.N.'s ability to serve its crowning purpose – the “never again” treatment of genocide that was vowed after the Holocaust, and re-vowed after Cambodia and Rwanda – is looking less and less credible in the wake of its response to ongoing genocide in Darfur. And finally, the U.N. has so far played no significant role in defusing the Ukrainian crisis.

Things have gotten bad enough that some are calling for Mr. Annan’s resignation, amid talk of former Czech President Vaclav Havel as successor. (“Havel for Secretary General” bumper stickers are on the Web.) But however you assess Mr. Havel’s chances of becoming secretary general, for Mr. Annan the comparison is devastating. Mr. Havel, after all, is a hero on behalf of freedom: A man who helped bring about the end of communist dominance in Eastern Europe, despite imprisonment and the threat of death – a man who could write that “Evil must be confronted in its womb and, if it can’t be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force.” Mr. Annan, by contrast, is a trimmer and temporizer who has stood up for tyrants far more than he has stood up to them.

If the comparison is damning to Kofi, it’s even more damning to the U.N. Mr. Havel once wrote Czech dictator Gustav Husak, “So far, you . . . have chosen . . . the path of inner decay for the sake of outward appearances . . . of deepening the spiritual and moral crisis of our society, and ceaselessly degrading human dignity, for the puny sake of protecting your own power.” One might say the same of the U.N. bureaucracy.

And that, perhaps, is the only argument against bringing Mr. Havel to the U.N. (Besides the obvious: He probably wouldn’t take the job.) The U.N. is losing what shreds of moral legitimacy remain, even among those who were once sympathetic, as the extent of its corruption becomes too obvious to ignore. There’s talk of replacing – or, more diplomatically, supplementing – the U.N. with a Community of Democracies that would draw its support from legitimate governments, not thugs and kleptocrats. At the very least, it seems likely that the U.N. will soon come under enormous pressure to reform.

But here’s a paradox: It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Annan could parry the pressure. But a U.N. headed by Mr. Havel might derive enough reflected legitimacy to resist such changes. According to Mr. Annan’s Web site, the secretary general is supposed to serve as a “symbol” of U.N. “ideals.” It may well be that he’s doing that more accurately than Vaclav Havel ever could.

Mr. Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee, publishes InstaPundit.com.

Interesting – Marc Rich, former fugitive financier whose wife Denise fundraised for Clinton and spent quite a few nights in the White House, and who subsequently received a pardon from President Clinton, is alleged to have jumped into Oil-for-Terror immediately upon receipt of his pardon:

Americans’ Role Eyed in U.N. Oil Scandal

Were American Oil Brokers Involved in Iraq Oil Kickback Schemes?

By BRIAN ROSS and RHONDA SCHWARTZ
ABC NEWS

Dec. 1, 2004 ? Former American fugitive Marc Rich was a middleman for several of Iraq’s suspect oil deals in February 2001, just one month after his pardon from President Clinton, according to oil industry shipping records obtained by ABC News.

And a U.S. criminal investigation is looking into whether Rich, as well as several other prominent oil traders, made illegal payments to Iraq in order to obtain the lucrative oil contracts.

“Without that kind of middleman, the system would not work because the major oil companies did not want to deal with Iraq because there was a mandated kickback,” said human rights investigator John Fawcett.

Another broker was New York oil trader Ben Pollner, head of Taurus Oil, who investigators say handled several billion dollars worth of the transactions now under investigation.

Pollner told ABC News he paid no bribes or kickbacks to the Iraqi regime.

Rich is still living in Switzerland and unavailable for comment.

The roles of several American oil companies, including ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil, are also under investigation. ChevronTexaco received subpoenas requesting information for two separate grand jury proceedings, and said they were cooperating fully with both investigations.

The U.N. oil-for-food corruption scandal only continues to grow in scope. Today, Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who is leading the congressional investigation into the program, said that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan should resign because the scandal occurred on his watch.

“I think there’s a terrible stain on the credibility and the reputation of the United Nations, there’s no doubt about that,” said Coleman. “If we’re ever to get to the bottom, how can you get there if the guy who was in charge during the course of this fraud and corruption is the guy now who is supposed to be ferreting it out?”

Top officials of the United Nations, including Annan, are accused of looking the other way as some $21 billion meant for humanitarian aid was stolen by the Saddam Hussein regime.

Uncovered in the federal criminal investigation were previously undisclosed payments to Annan’s son, Kojo, from his employer Cotecna. The Swiss company had been specifically hired to monitor the oil-for-food program.

Annan’s son left the company in 1998 but received payments until this year.

Secretary-general since 1997, Annan said this week he was unaware of the payments. “Naturally I was very disappointed and surprised, yes,” he said.

Also under criminal investigation is the U.N. official Annan put in charge of the program, Benon Sevan.

Documents discovered by U.S. forces in Iraq suggest Sevan received payments in the form of oil contacts from the Hussein regime, although Sevan has denied any wrongdoing.

This could have gone on the French thread as well…

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,140478,00.html

French Connection to Oil for Food Probed

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Fox News

PARIS ? As investigators dig into the scandal-plagued U.N. Oil-for-Food program, one question keeps surfacing ? how deep does the link between French officials and Saddam Hussein go?

The CIA?s Iraq Survey Group (search) released a report in September that, in part, suggested that French businessmen and politicians with close ties to French President Jacques Chirac (search) may have received bribes from Saddam. It also said that French companies may have sold weapons to Iraq on the eve of the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

But French officials maintain that accusations of wrongdoing and illegal profiting against France have been made without proof. French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte (search) complained in a letter to a congressional investigator about the insinuation of French wrongdoing.

?The Oil-for-Food program did not produce smuggling. While the transactions agreed under the program served as ‘support’ for embezzlement and criminal offenses … such actions existed before the program was established and continued to exist outside it,? he wrote.

? To read a copy of the Levitte letter, click here (pdf) ( http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/101104_levitte_oilforfood.pdf )

FOX News? Jonathan Hunt traveled to Paris to look deeper into the French connection in the Oil-for-Food scandal. Following are excerpts from his reports, which aired this week on the FOX News Channel.

French Senator Denies Taking Saddam’s Money

Over three decades Charles Pasqua’s name has been linked to a series of French corruption scandals, but the former French interior minister has maintained his innocence and has never been convicted of any wrongdoing.

Now, Pasqua is being eyed as a player in the Oil-for-Food scandal. The CIA?s report listed Pasqua as having received oil vouchers from Saddam, vouchers that would have given him a profit of at least $400,000.

?I have never received anything from Saddam Hussein,? he said through an interpreter.

FOX News asked Pasqua why his name ended up in the CIA report?

?It’s a good question,? he said. ?It’s not only my name that’s there. The names of other French officials are included."

Pasqua said he?s willing to testify before Congress if asked. ?I am ready to answer all the questions they want to ask,? he said.

Asked if he would be willing to open his bank accounts to investigators, Pasqua said: ?Absolutely, no problem.?

Late last week investigators from the House International Relations Committee invited Pasqua to meet with them but it has yet to get a reply.

A French Investigator Watches

Eva Joly spent the better part of a decade as a French investigating magistrate looking into allegations of bribery involving French oil companies and senior politicians and political parties. Among her targets: Chirac’s RPR party and Pasqua.

Her investigations brought convictions against more than 30 oil company executives, but thanks in part to France’s immunity laws the top targets escaped.

?There are several investigations going on concerning Mr. Chirac but he cannot even be heard as a witness because of this rule saying he has immunity, but as soon as he is out of office he will have to answer questions from the judiciary,? Joly told FOX News.

Joly warned that anyone who pursues senior politicians in France faces real danger. Although no one has ever been charged with threatening her, Joly said her house was broken into, her telephones were bugged and her secretary was robbed. She said she feared for her life.

Now living in Norway, Joly will be watching closely as U.S. congressional investigators pursue the French connection to Oil-for-Food, hoping that an American investigation can succeed where the French probe failed.

Lawmaker: Reform Must Start at Top

French lawmaker Arnaud Montebourg said he believes that France?s perceived culture of corruption can be changed but that the changes must start at the top with Chirac.

Montebourg, a Socialist member of the French Parliament, said Chirac should be impeached because he is personally implicated in corruption.

?It’s unacceptable for the world and for our reputation that our president is involved in such a way, so heavily, in very big cases of corruption, so I’m sorry to think that France is damaged by all this bad reputation,? Montebourg told FOX News.

Chirac has not faced prosecution in any scandals because French law gives him immunity from even being questioned until he leaves office despite any evidence against him.

Montebourg’s party does not now have the votes in the French parliament to force impeachment and the French people don’t seem to be clamoring to change the immunity laws.