Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Will the U.N. Development Program Probe Be Ban Ki-Moon's First Cover-Up?
Thursday , January 25, 2007
By Claudia Rosett and George Russell
UNITED NATIONS Less than one month into his job, the new United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has already had his first scandal. Now he may be engineering his first cover-up.
For just one day last week, it looked like Ban, in the first real test of his self-proclaimed mission to restore trust at the U.N., had risen above the bureaucratic evasions of his scandal-plagued predecessor, Kofi Annan. That day was Jan. 19, shortly after FOX News and The Wall Street Journal broke the story of U.S. State Department accusations that the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), violating its own rules, had allowed hard currency to flow to the now-sanctioned rogue regime of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. The State Department told of UNDP offices in North Korea dominated by officials of the regime, sham audits of programs to hide the cash flow, and an extended cover-up of the situation by the UNDP itself.
Ban came out that same day for a public housecleaning, with guns blazing. In a break with the stonewalls of the U.N. when faced with Oil-for-Food and other scandals, he promised to call for what his spokeswoman described as an urgent, system-wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the U.N. funds and programmes.
For this, Ban earned immediate praise, even from some of the U.N.s most diehard critics. And he seemed intent on sticking to his guns. When a reporter dropped by the office of Bans spokeswoman, Michele Montas, late that same Friday evening, she took time to offer assurances that yes, indeed, the audit would be rigorous, complete and independent. Asked, specifically, if outside, private auditors would be employed to ensure integrity, she said, Yes.
But by Monday, Ban was backtracking faster than you can say ACABQ which is the acronym for the U.N. General Assemblys own budget oversight body, the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions which Ban was suddenly proposing to use as the overseer of his promised housecleaning.
To call that a huge step backward would be understatement. Among other things, the former chairman of the ACABQ, Vladimir Kuznetsov, was one of two U.N. officials indicted in 2005 on charges of bribery and money-laundering in connection with a highly publicized U.N. procurement scandal. (One, Alexander Yakovlev, pleaded guilty. Kuznetsov has pleaded not guilty, and goes on trial next month in New York federal court).
It was during the time that Kuznetsov held his U.N. budget oversight job that illicit funds were allegedly passing through his secret Caribbean bank account. Somehow, his alleged crimes escaped the ACABQs attention.
It is this same ACABQ that Ban now proposes to use as a conduit for handling the inspection of the UNDPs North Korean unit, which will be carried out not by a truly independent outside auditing firm, but by using the U.N.s own external auditors.
This U.N. group of auditors may be called external in U.N. parlance meaning it is not composed of career U.N. bureaucrats but it is hardly independent of the U.N. itself. The board is made up of the government audit arms of a rotating trio of U.N. member states, currently consisting of the Philippines, South Africa and France. This was precisely the same trio of government auditors, serving on precisely the same U.N. oversight board, that provided so-called external audits during the final graft-crammed years of Oil-for-Food...
