Was Going to Throw This In Politics, Then Realize the Repercussions

[Annie]

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3639483

TO THE leadership of the United Nations, Thursday February 3rd must have felt like Judgment Day. A few blocks away from the world body’s New York headquarters, Paul Volcker, a respected former head of America’s Federal Reserve, issued the first interim report of his committee’s investigation into the UN's oil-for-food programme for Iraq. Its findings do not flatter the organisation, and are devastatingly critical of Benon Sevan, the executive director of the oil-for-food programme.

The programme was begun in 1996, allowing Iraq to sell oil to buy food and humanitarian goods to ease the suffering of sanctions-hit Iraqis. Iraq stonewalled the creation of oil-for-food until it received sole discretion from the UN in choosing buyers for oil and sellers of food and medicine. This allowed Saddam Hussein’s regime to make huge amounts of money in a variety of frauds, such as overcharging the programme for imports and levying illegal surcharges on oil sales. It is also alleged that Saddam awarded oil vouchers to buy political influence.

Mr Volcker’s interim report answered some, though by no means all, of the questions surrounding the scandal. According to the report, Saddam-era Iraqi documents indicated that the programme head asked Iraq to allocate oil to a company called African Middle East Petroleum (AMEP), represented by a friend of Mr Sevan’s, Fakhry Abdelnour (who is also a distant cousin of former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali). In return, Mr Sevan fought to allow Iraq to buy spare parts for its oil infrastructure, as opposed to food and the like, with its oil-for-food proceeds. In doing so, said Mr Volcker, Mr Sevan placed himself in a “grave and continuing conflict-of-interest situation”...

 

[Gem]

The investigation was a joke, everyone knew it going in, and the outcome should be nothing less than expected.

Imagine if we ran everything in this way. Murders could pick their mothers as their prosecutors...Martha Stewert's crimes could have been investigated by her biggest fan...

Give me a break...the UN has lost any shred of credibility it once had among anyone with a brain. Even if you respected and admired what it supposedly stood for, to ignore the corruption, theft, rape, and myriad of other abuses that went on and were condoned within its walls and under its sanction is to be either woefully uninformed, or insanely blind.