Oil for Food (OFF) Debacle aka UNSCAM
- Lawhawk
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» Lawhawk - Sevan Suspended With Pay By Kofi
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=st...The next bunch of steps by the UN is a whitewash. I would be more encouraged by this suspension had Kofi rescinded the diplomatic immunity for Sevan and others named and unnamed thus far in the UNSCAM investigation.
Benon Sevan, who was in charge of the $64 billion humanitarian program, and Joseph Stephanides, who heads the U.N. Security Council Affairs Division, were told Friday that they had been suspended with pay, spokesman Fred Eckhard said.Sevan and Stephanides were told they would receive a letter this week "laying out the charges against them," which will allow them to defend themselves before U.N. disciplinary bodies in what will likely be a long appeals process, he said.
"Suspension is the beginning of a disciplinary process," Eckhard said.
Then we'd see real action.
-- posted by Lawhawk
» Lawhawk - Judicial Watch Files Suit To Get U.S. Documents
http://www.nysun.com/article/9092-- posted by Lawhawk
» Lawhawk - Benon Sevan Blocked Audit
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=st...The U.N. oil-for-food program chief under scrutiny for alleged corruption and mismanagement blocked a proposed audit of his office around the same time he's accused of soliciting lucrative oil deals from Iraq (news - web sites), according to investigators.
A U.N. auditing team, which was severely understaffed, said running the $64 billion oil-for-food program was "a high risk activity" and a priority for review. But Benon Sevan denied the internal auditors' request to hire a consultant to examine his office in May 2001 — an act top investigators of the program are now calling into question."I think the auditors thought they were steered away from some areas," Paul Volcker, who's leading the independent probe, told The Associated Press. "Our judgment is that the main office should have been audited. And that leaves the inference that perhaps the auditors were not encouraged to do the work. I think we draw the inference that it was at least suspicious."
Two months after Sevan refused the auditors' request, a Panamanian company, African Middle East Petroleum, purchased 1 million barrels of oil, which Iraq had allocated to Sevan — one of nine allocations made between 1998 and 2002 involving Sevan and believed to have netted the company $1.5 million, said an interim report Volcker's committee released this month.
The head of AMEP, Fakhry Abdelnour, a friend of Sevan, told investigators he paid $160,000 as a kickback to an Iraqi-controlled account in Jordan in October 2001 under one of the oil-for-food schemes under examination.
Volcker did not say that Sevan received kickbacks but expressed concern at $160,000 in cash that Sevan said he received from an aunt in his native Cyprus in 1999-2003. The investigative report questioned this "unexplained wealth," noting that the aunt, who recently died, was a retired government photographer living on a modest pension.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) last week suspended Sevan after Volcker accused him of a "grave conflict of interest," saying his conduct in soliciting oil deals for AMEP was "ethically improper and seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations (news - web sites)."
On the day Volcker issued his report, Sevan's lawyer, Eric Lewis, accused the panel of trying to make his client a "scapegoat," saying: "Mr. Sevan never took a penny." He said Sevan was proud of his 40-year U.N. career and of the oil-for-food program, which saved tens of thousands of Iraqis "from death by disease and starvation."
The oil-for-food program was the largest U.N. humanitarian aid operation, running in 1996-2003. It was designed to let Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s government sell limited amounts of oil in exchange for humanitarian goods as an exemption from post-Gulf War (news - web sites) sanctions imposed in 1991.
Faced with a $64 billion program involving multiple U.N. agencies, the small team of auditors assigned to monitor it were overmatched and underfunded. For other programs, Volcker's investigators said, the United Nations mandated one auditor for every $100 million in funding. At that ratio, the oil-for-food program managers should have expected more than 160 auditors.
Instead, in 2001, they had only five, according to Volcker's report.
Volcker's report said structural problems within the U.N. audit system undermined auditors' authority. In many cases, auditors were forced to seek funding from the budgets of the programs they sought to monitor, giving the managers an implicit veto — which Sevan exercised.
A little-noticed portion of Volcker's report details how Sevan steered auditors away from his office and its regulation of the oil and humanitarian goods contracts that allegedly were the source for a massive kickback scheme run by Saddam's government, which investigators estimate brought in between $1.9 billion and $2.9 billion.
In April 2001, the head of the five-member U.N. auditing team, Esther Stern, wrote to Sevan requesting funds for an outside accountant to evaluate the management of the main oil-for-food office he ran at U.N. headquarters in New York, according to Volcker's report.
Because the auditors' own resources were insufficient for the $70,000 fee to the accountant Arthur Anderson — by protocol — they needed Sevan's approval. He declined.
After considering the matter for a month, Sevan responded to the letter, saying that because of uncertainty about how much longer the oil-for-food program would continue, he could not justify the expense. About the same time, Sevan and his team moved into a new office at a cost of more than $3 million.
After that exchange, the auditors, following the advice of Sevan's office, used their resources to review programs inside Iraq, the auditors told investigators in interviews.
"There were other instances where they were dissuaded from looking at the main office," said Mark Pieth, one of the two other committee members on Volcker's investigative panel and an expert on money laundering. "The problem we see is that there was no independent institution that regulated audits across the U.N. and could step in when these instances occurred."
Investigators told the AP they have no evidence Sevan's office coerced auditors to look the other way but instead steered them to other work outside his office.
"They were influenced in some cases, but whether they were influenced for nefarious purposes is another question" Volcker said. "They could always say, don't bother with us, your priority is to go investigate in Baghdad. The underlying problem was that the auditing force was so small, was so in demand and did not have strong enough reporting lines to overcome any problems."
Investigators suggested that if Sevan's office would have been audited alleged abuses of the oil-for-food program would have almost certainly been uncovered.
"There are some features of the contracts, that had they been audited, it could have brought the whole scheme into question," an official close to the investigation said on condition of anonymity.
The U.N. audit team did carry out more than 50 audits of U.N. agencies, which spent Iraqi oil revenues under oil-for-food or the U.N. Compensation Commission that was established to make payments to countries, businesses or individuals harmed by Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The audits, which Volcker released last month, uncovered extensive mismanagement by the agencies of multimillion-dollar deals with contractors and fraudulent paperwork by its employees.
"The concrete work that they did was quite good," Pieth told the AP in a telephone interview Friday. "They were tenacious, but they had too few resources."
-- posted by Lawhawk
» Lawhawk - Is it time to perp walk Sevan and Kojo Annan?
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/a...The Washington Times reports this morning that the Senate investigation into the Oil-For-Food program led by Norm Coleman will highlight much more active roles for Kojo Annan and Benon Sevan in the corruption than Paul Volcker's interim report suggested. Annan played a more significant role with Cotecna than Volcker reported.Of course, asking for their heads, plus that of Kofi Annan may not come to fruition because too many players are at risk of doing the perp walk themselves for their involvement in the scandal. While Benon Sevan and Kojo Annan are low hanging fruit who may be the sacrificial lambs to protect the UN from a more thorough investigation - which means Kofi is more secure.
-- posted by Lawhawk
» Lawhawk - Lax oversight is just the start...
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/406...A former U.N. oil-for-food inspector told a Senate panel yesterday that he witnessed managers drinking on the job while hundreds of trucks carrying unknown cargo crossed the Iraqi border — unchecked.The UN wasn't committed to properly overseeing the OFF program, and Saddam exploited this knowledge. He worked on those countries that might be favorable to lifting sanctions, and officials who could grease the wheels in his favor.Arthur Ventham, an ex-employee of the Swiss firm Cotecna, which inspected aid shipments into Iraq for the United Nations, gave the testimony before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Ventham said he was stunned at the laxity of the operation set up on Iraq's borders to police the program and ensure that Saddam Hussein wasn't violating sanctions.
During a one-week assignment in January 2003 to a border station at Al-Waleed, Ventham said he conducted inspections of only three trucks entering Iraq, while between 400 and 500 were allowed to pass his checkpoint and enter Iraq, showing only paperwork.
-- posted by Lawhawk
» Lawhawk - A case against the UN
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,1477...U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette (search) said the United Nations was unprepared for the mammoth task of providing humanitarian relief for 24 million Iraqis and hoped it would never be given a job like the Oil-for-Food (search) program again.Seems to me, that this is a good enough reason to keep the UN from being involved in tsunami relief as well. Considering that the tsunami relief will affect an even larger population and a wider geographic area, Frechette's comments are revealing.
-- posted by Lawhawk
» Lawhawk - Roger L. Simon: Little Chance Volcker Will Reveal True Extent
http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2...Great as Claudia Rosett has been, the only one who could really write the story of Oil-for-Food is Joseph Conrad because this tale of corruption is as rich and complex as Nostromo or Under Western Eyes. For the last few days, lead investigators for Paul Volcker's Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Progamme have been in London, Geneva, Paris and perhaps elsewhere, interviewing parties of interest who may have known about connections between Kojo Annan, Cotecna, and Nigerian and Iraqi government officials. A final report is promised by the end of the month but I am somewhat skeptical that this particular group can complete their task effectively. They are reportedly American attorneys. Do they have the linguistic capabilities (fluent Arabic and French at the minimum), not to mention experience in the ways of the developing world, to investigate murky transactions that took place in Africa in 1998-1999?I'm with Roger on this although for slightly different reasons. The Volcker crew doesn't have subpoena powers, which means it can't get the people it wants to testify and give evidence to come in and testify. It has to hope that people will talk.1998 is the operative year when then 23-year old Kojo came to join Cotecna, a company then under sanction in Nigeria for arms sales. December 31 of that year is when that same company sealed the deal with the United Nations, replacing the venerable Lloyd's as the UN's oil agent of choice. No one has explained to me why Lloyd's had to be replaced. Perhaps that is significant, perhaps not. (Apparently only a handful of companies could do such work.) And what, if anything, was young Kojo doing in the Fall of '98 that gave his company this windfall? At the very least, one would have to go to Lagos, where Kojo was based with Cotecna, and perhaps to South Africa, where other meetings were held, to find out. And maybe you would have to go with George Smiley, rather than the Volcker crew.
That differs from the Senate and House investigations being run in Congress into the matter - those committee investigations have subpoena powers, though limited by diplomatic immunity among some of those involved, but it is far more revealing than Volcker's investigation.
-- posted by Lawhawk
» Lawhawk - Turning up the heat...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,1490...With U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (search) next up for review by Paul Volcker’s inquiry into the Oil-for-Food scandal, a crucial question is whether Volcker will expand upon information tying the scandal directly to the U.N. chief’s office — by way of Annan’s second-in command, Louise Frechette (search).Release the hounds and let at 'em.Four years into the seven-year Oil-for-Food (search) program, with graft and mismanagement by then rampant, Frechette intervened directly by telephone to stop United Nations auditors from forwarding their investigations to the U.N. Security Council. This detail was buried on page 186 of the 219-page interim report Volcker’s Independent Inquiry Committee released Feb. 3.
This decision from within Annan’s office left only the Secretariat privy to the specifics of the waste, bungling and contractual breaches detailed by U.N. internal auditors in dozens of damning reports. The extent of what Annan’s office knew was not available either to the Security Council or the public until Congress finally forced the issue and the United Nations produced the reports in conjunction with a Volcker "briefing paper" in January.
Frechette, 58, came to the United Nations following a long career as a Canadian civil servant. The first Deputy Secretary-General in U.N. history, she has served since 1998 as Annan’s chief administrator. She also chairs the steering committee on U.N. Reform and Management Policy.
Frechette’s actions stand in sharp contrast to the assertions of Annan and his public relations staff that the Security Council – and not the Secretariat – supervised the more than $110 billion Oil-for-Food program. Her decision, as documented by Volcker, also places responsibility squarely in the secretary-general’s office for obscuring mismanagement of the program from the Security Council (search).
-- posted by Lawhawk
» Lawhawk - By Boutros-Ghali - Former UN Sec. Gen. Implicated?
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/416... - again, not a real surprise that members of the UN were deeply involved in UNSCAM, but this is the most significant indication that Saddam Hussein thoroughly coopted the UN's oversight regime for OFF.Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali worked against U.S.-backed sanctions against Saddam Hussein — and even had an Iraqi Ba'athist advising him on Middle East policy, a former U.N. official said.
In a blistering statement released by the House International Relations Committee last night, Paul Conlon, who used to work on the Iraq Sanctions Committee, said lax management and the former secretary general's opposition to U.S. policies played a key role in the morphing of the oil-for-food program into the world's biggest financial scandal.Congressional investigators and law enforcement agencies have recently been taking a closer look at Boutros-Ghali, who was secretary general at the time when the U.N. oil-for-food program was launched.
The U.N. Commission, headed by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, is said to be interested in links between several of Boutros-Ghali's relatives and a company that benefited from sweetheart U.N. oil deals.
In the latest bombshell released in advance of new congressional hearings today, Conlon wrote that the Egyptian-born Boutros-Ghali was opposed to sanctions imposed on Iraq in the wake of its invasion of Kuwait and took a "neutral stance" toward Saddam.
Many U.N. agencies had "good relations" with Saddam's regime, Conlon added, and Boutros-Ghali "appointed a retired Iraqi diplomat" as his Middle East adviser.
-- posted by Lawhawk
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