Whitewashes

The conclusions of the Volcker report regarding Kofi Annans involvement in the UN oil-for-food programme come as no surprise. Roger Simon goes into details and summarizes:

...anyone who thinks Kofi Annan is the man to reform the United Nations has the intelligence of a gnat or the morals of Saddam Hussein.

Here is another example of a whitewashing attempt: the "European Anti-Fraud Office's" (Olaf) investigation into the EU's financial contributions to the Palestinian Authority. John Rosenthal found this hilarious statement in a press release by Olaf:

...there are consistent indications to support the hypothesis that it cannot be excluded that some of the assets of the PA may have been used by some individuals for other than the intended purposes.

Of course, Olaf states that no misuse of EU funds took place...

Read all of John Rosenthal's posting on the matter.

Comments

[Pogue]

EU funds to the PA were issued in special colors to prevent them from use by Hamas to pay for murders of innocents

US funds to the PA were issued as Micky Mouse money for the same reason

Frankly the whole lot of us were idiots for supporting the PA under Arafat at all

[Lou Minatti]

Here's how the UN could get out of their bind. Appoint Bill Clinton as UN Secretary General. It's no secret that Clinton wants the job. This would appeal to the Bush-haters, while UN skeptics in the US could take comfort in knowing that since Clinton is a US citizen he would be subject to US laws and its penalties. Clinton would be forced to lead a clean shop. Inept as always (this is the UN, after all), but I think he'd keep things much more honest.

Annan is a corrupt pig, but he's "untouchable" by the law. He can go back to Ghana a free and wealthy man.

[Sock Puppet of Doom]

The EU report is full of it. At least 80% of the money it provided was used to fund armed struggle (very darned little of it) or disappointed into number swiss accounts (the majority).

Annan wouldn't know how to live in Africa. He has been living in the US almost full time since the 1960's.

[Lebemann]

i like the OLAF press release. t reads like something out of the brit tv series "yes minister".

i can hear the charcter of Sir Humphrey Appleby, permanent secretary, spin-doctoring between the lines:

Quote: "On the basis of the information available to date, the investigation found no conclusive evidence of support of armed attacks or unlawful activities financed by EC contributions to the PA budget."

Sir Humphrey Appleby:
"Minister, the reason to set up an investigation is to find nothing. You have to appoint a sound character to head it. Someone who can take advice. Someone who knows what is expected of him. Some documents have to be taken from the investigation dossier because they might be outdated, some because of reasons of national security. Of course this leaves the investigation with a little less paperwork to look at, but in each life some rain must fall."

Quote: "However, there are consistent indications to support the hypothesis that it cannot be excluded that some of the assets of the PA may have been used by some individuals for other than the intended purposes."

Quote: "However, OLAF was never in a position directly to monitor the expenditure of the PA. In this respect, OLAF had to rely on the answers given by the PA Ministry of Finance which were not always supported by documentation. In addition, OLAF does not have the legal powers necessary to investigate some further details, e.g. through gaining access to bank information. A number of factors continue therefore to remain unclear."

Sir Humphrey Appleby:
"We put some wording in the report that the absolute opposite of the investigations' findings may, however, be true if other evidence surfaces. In this way we avoid all future embarrassment."

Sir Humphrey Appleby is a shining example of that truth always is much less believable then fiction.

[Lou Minatti]

Niko, Clinton would not have to give up his US citizenship.

[Sandy P]

It's time for an Asian to hold the post, remember, the black turbans announced they might nominate Khatami.

[Doug]

Clinton would be forced to lead a clean shop.

You mean like when he was President?

*shudder*

[Downer]

An organization in serious trouble. In the US is the initiative "US out of UN". We should consider this when we read:

Vorwürfe gegen hochrangige Uno-Beamtin

Mitarbeiter gemobbt und belästigt

Nach dem Untersuchungsbericht zum Öl-für-Lebensmittel-Programm drohen den Vereinten Nationen weitere peinliche Enthüllungen. Die Leiterin der Uno-Abteilung, die unter anderem die Wahl im Irak organisierte, soll Mitarbeiter mit anzüglichen Bemerkungen belästigt, sie öffentlich beschimpft und heimlich ihre E-Mails gelesen haben.

http://nzz.ch/2005/03/30/al/newzzE6XYIOY6-12.html

[Downer]

My English skills are not the best. But good enough to come to the conclusion: The Volcker report is a two-edged swort. Germany's newspapers don't pay any attention to this extraordinary important news. For a lot of good reasons: The communism-lite red-green coalition wants a seat in the UN security council. But there is the good old WSJ with a great opinion:

Kofi's Accountability
March 30, 2005; Page A16

Following yesterday's publication of Paul Volcker's second interim report on the U.N.'s Oil for Food program, Kofi Annan issued a statement saying "the inquiry has cleared me of any wrongdoing." Later, asked if had any plans to resign, he answered, "Hell no!" Question for the Secretary General: How do you define "wrongdoing"?

In the narrowest sense, Mr. Volcker's Committee found "no evidence" that the Secretary General influenced the U.N.'s 1998 selection of Swiss inspections company Cotecna for an Oil for Food contract. It also found that "the evidence is not reasonably sufficient to show that the Secretary-General knew that Cotecna had submitted a bid on the humanitarian inspection contract in 1998."

In a broader sense, however, what Mr. Volcker's report reveals is an "adverse finding" against the Secretary General: That is, patterns of willful neglect, conflict of interest and incompetence that would have any business CEO out on his ear.

Consider just a few salient details that emerge from the 90-page report. In November 2004, Mr. Volcker's Committee asked Mr. Annan if he had ever met Cotecna's owner Elie Massey prior to the U.N.'s awarding the inspection contract in December 1998. Mr. Annan said he had met Mr. Massey only once, and briefly, in Geneva in late 1999.

In fact, Mr. Annan had met Mr. Massey twice before the contract was awarded. The first time, in February 1997, he and Mrs. Annan met privately with Mr. Massey and his wife for evening cocktails in Davos, Switzerland, on the sidelines of a meeting of the World Economic Forum. The second time, Mr. Annan met with Mr. Massey privately in his office in New York, apparently to discuss a lottery scheme to raise money for the U.N.

In a subsequent interview with the Committee, Mr. Annan remembered "brief encounters" with Mr. Massey, the purposes of which he could not precisely recall. But given that Mr. Annan's schedule in Davos was otherwise cluttered with meetings with world leaders, why would he choose to spend his dinner hour in the company of a relatively obscure businessman, save for the fact that Mr. Annan's son Kojo was employed by him?

Or consider Mr. Annan's September 1998 luncheon in Durban with Kojo and French businessman Pierre Mouselli. As we reported yesterday -- and as the Volcker report confirms -- Mr. Mouselli had sought and obtained the meeting with the senior Annan as a prerequisite for going into business with Kojo. In Mr. Mouselli's recollection, he and Kojo discussed Cotecna with the Secretary General, along with their other business plans.

In his meeting with the Committee, the Secretary General initially acknowledged only a brief encounter with his son and Mr. Mouselli. According to the report, "when shown his appointment schedule indicating lunch with 'Kojo & his friend,' the Secretary General stated he did not 'recollect having lunch with Kojo and a friend' and that it was a 'hectic time for me.' The Secretary-General denied that he was present with Kojo Annan and any business associates at any time that Cotecna's business was discussed."

Since Kojo refuses to cooperate with the Volcker Committee (he calls it "part of a broader Republican political agenda"), the question of what was discussed at the Durban lunch is a matter of Mr. Mouselli's word against Mr. Annan's. But we have interviewed Mr. Mouselli and find his testimony convincing -- more so than a Secretary General whose memory seems repeatedly to have been "refreshed" by Committee investigators.

Still, the matter of Mr. Annan's credibility as a witness is almost trivial next to what the report reveals about the U.N.'s mismanagement of the Cotecna bid, which is merely symptomatic of its larger management and conflict-of-interest failures.

Throughout Mr. Volcker's investigation, the U.N. has steadfastly maintained that it hired Cotecna because it put in the lowest bid -- $499 per man-day rate against $600 for the next-lowest bidder. But as we have previously reported, Cotecna upped its asking price within days of winning the contract without triggering a competitive rebid. Then too, at the time the U.N. awarded the contract to Cotecna Mr. Massey was under criminal investigation by a Swiss magistrate on money laundering charges.

U.N. procurement officials claim to have been ignorant of Cotecna's legal troubles, despite their having been the subject of a front page story in the New York Times. Yet according to the report, Mr. Annan himself had known of the allegations against Cotecna since 1998, but had been reassured by his son that "there was not much to it." And it finds that had there been more than a "one day inquiry" into 1999 news reports that Kojo worked for Cotecna, it is "unlikely that Cotecna would have been rewarded renewals" of its U.N. contracts. The man who ordered that perfunctory probe, Mr. Annan's then-chief of staff Iqbal Riza, shredded potentially relevant documents last year.

What we have summarized here provides merely a taste of the full report, which can be found at the Volcker Committee's Web site: www.iic-offp.org. Anyone who still thinks Mr. Annan has been acquitted of "wrongdoing" would do well to read it, as would anyone who still believes Mr. Annan is fit to lead the United Nations.

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111214455690892690,00.html?mod=opinion%5Fmain%5Freview%5Fand%5Foutlooks

[mamapajamas]

Downer: "The communism-lite red-green coalition wants a seat in the UN security council."

In the US, we refer to people like this as "watermelons"... red on the inside, green on the outside ;).

You've done an excellent evaluation of the situation. If Kofi Annan did not know what was going on under his nose, then he is hopelessly incompetent and should be removed anyway. The probability is that he DID know, however.

Either way, he needs to GO.

[Tom Penn]

Kofi has presided over the most egregious criminal failures in UN history. The most devastating genocide of our time happened under the watch of UN peacekeepers and Kofi Annan. As did this unprecedented criminal corruption of Oil for Fraud. Kofi must go, but this will not fix the UN.

The UN is clearly broken beyond repair. To be completely fair, it never really worked in the first place. The UN has accomplished nothing it set out to do in it's charter (http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/) to speak of. But, it is worse than just ineffective, the organization is little more than a dictators club and a vehicle for international organized crime. Kofi must leave, but the UN still must be kicked to the curb and replaced by a organization comprised of allied, free, true democracies.