When Will Kofi Go? When Will Rosett Win A Pulitzer?

[Annie]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,163984,00.html

U.N. Mystery Man: Who Is Jean-Bernard Merimee and What's His Oil-for-Food Tie?

Thursday, July 28, 2005

By Claudia Rosett

NEW YORK — As investigations proliferate into the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal, one of the more intriguing mysteries involves a former French diplomat with a direct link to the U.N.’s executive suite: Jean-Bernard Merimee (search).

The 68-year-old Merimee, one of several individuals now under investigation in France for alleged involvement in Saddam Hussein’s Oil-for-Food scams, is well known for his role in the early 1990s as French ambassador to the United Nations. What investigators have not so far highlighted is that during the period Merimee is alleged to have come into commercial contact with Saddam’s regime, starting in December 2001, he was working not for the French government, but as a special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (search).

Merimee’s name first surfaced in relation to Oil-for-Food (search) early last year, with the publication in Baghdad’s Al-Mada newspaper of a long list of politicians and businessmen worldwide alleged to have received lucrative oil allocations from Saddam, which could be resold to commercial dealers for an easy profit.

His name turned up again last fall, with the release of a report by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group, in an annex containing what senior U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer (search) described as “secret lists” maintained in Baghdad by senior officials of Saddam’s regime.

On these lists, the apparent mention of Jean-Bernard Merimee, transliterated from Arabic as “Mr. Jan Mirami [French]” turned up three times, noted as having been allocated 4 million barrels of oil during the last three of the U.N. program’s 13 six-month phases — a stretch beginning Dec. 1, 2001 and truncated in March 2003 when the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam.

Did Merimee even know he was on the Saddam regime’s secret list of oil beneficiaries?

According to the Duelfer report, the allocations linked to Merimee’s name were “not performed.” The Duelfer report does show the Merimee allocations linked to an oil trading company, French-based Aredio Petroleum, which also appears in the report as the alleged intermediary for a number of deals with other parties, in which oil was lifted. These include oil allocations to the Iraqi-French Friendship Society, as well as a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zurequat, sometime business partner of British parliamentarian George Galloway — whose name also appears on the Al Mada and Duelfer lists, but who has denied receiving any oil allocations from Iraq.

Nonetheless, the Merimee-Saddam connection could spell yet more trouble for Secretary-General Annan, who from 1997-2003 presided over the management of Oil-for-Food, and is already close to the scandal on several fronts.

His son, Kojo Annan, worked for a company hired in 1998 by the U.N. Secretariat to inspect Oil-for-Food imports into Iraq. Annan’s handpicked head of the Oil-for-Food program — former Under Secretary-General Benon Sevan, now a $1-per-year U.N. “adviser” — is under criminal investigation in New York state and has been censured for a “grave and continuing conflict of interest” by the U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food, which is expected to issue further findings about him shortly.

Earlier this month, another of Annan’s special advisers — Maurice Strong, who also held the senior rank of Under Secretary-General and was Annan’s personal envoy to North Korea — departed the United Nations pending clarification of his ties to Tongsun Park, a South Korean charged by the U.S. attorney with accepting millions of dollars from Saddam’s regime to lobby U.N. officials.

Now comes the French investigation into Merimee, who was hired by Annan in 1999 to work “as needed” as “Special Adviser of the Secretary-General for European issues.” Merimee served from 1991-1995 as French ambassador to the United Nations, and then as French ambassador to Italy.

Until this week, Merimee figured on the U.N. Web site’s list of “Special and Personal Representatives and Envoys of the Secretary-General,” with the rank of Under Secretary-General. Following a query this past Tuesday into Merimee’s whereabouts, the United Nations quietly removed his name from the list. Asked about the revision, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric (search) explained that Merimee has not worked for the United Nations since Feb. 14, 2002, and that his name had remained on the list for more than three years due to an “oversight.”

According to Dujarric, Merimee’s job as special adviser to Annan was to help the United Nations negotiate a framework for “the disbursement of funds” from the European Commission to the world body, leading to a deal that was signed in 2003. Presumably, that entailed no direct link to Iraq. But it did place Merimee in the sensitive spot of negotiating for the Secretary-General over arrangements for European funding for the United Nations.

Merimee was still doing that job in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, as the debate began turning hot over Iraq – a debate that ultimately polarized with Annan lining up with European heavyweights Germany and France to protest the U.S.-led coalition’s overthrow of Saddam.

In his position as Annan’s special adviser on Europe – whether Merimee knew it or not — he would have made a logical target for Saddam’s attempts to lobby both the European Union and by extension the United Nations, especially with European funding at issue. Certainly Merimee would have been a familiar figure to some of Saddam’s veteran senior diplomats.

In Merimee’s earlier incarnation as French U.N. ambassador, he did four one-month stints as chairman of the U.N. Security Council (search): in 1991, 1992 and 1994, during the early years of U.N. sanctions against Iraq, and again in May 1995, the month after the Security Council passed Resolution 986 authorizing Iraqi relief under sanctions, via oil-for-food. Merimee is on record both as insisting in 1991 that Iraq cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, and dismissing as irrelevant in 1994 a U.S. presentation of photos showing that while the Iraqi people were suffering the squeeze of sanctions, Saddam was building palaces.

What to make of all this? Repeated attempts this week to contact Merimee — or even locate him — hit a series of dead ends. Spokesmen for the French U.N. mission, the European Commission’s New York office, and the United Nations itself, all say they have no contact information for him. Calls to a phone number in Paris said to be his were not answered.

Despite the allegations, there is no proof Merimee did anything wrong. It remains a source of some mystery whether French investigators now delving into the case will divulge whether Merimee was knowingly involved in Saddam’s plans to provide him with profitable oil deals; or was the unwitting target of a failed bribery scheme; or whether the allegations about “Jan Mirami [French],” are accurate at all.

On the U.N. front, however, there is the question of why, if Merimee’s work for the organization ended on Feb. 14, 2002, there was no public announcement of his departure. And also why his name remained for another three years on the public list of those enjoying the senior status of U.N. under –secretary-general and special adviser to Kofi Annan — an “oversight” amended only after an inquiry to Annan’s office this week, following up on recent news that Merimee had become one of the targets of a French Oil-for-Food probe.

And, on a far bigger scale, there is the question of whether the U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, is planning to clarify not only the roles in the scandal of former Under Secretaries-General Maurice Strong, Benon Sevan and now Jean-Bernard Merimee, but their ties to Annan himself — and his knowledge, if any, of their alleged ties to Saddam during their U.N. service.

Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with The Foundations for the Defense of Democracies and a consultant to FOX News.

 

[Annie]

The Question In my title still applies. Now it's also Kofi's brother that seemed to be in line:

http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=291309&attrib_id=7378

U.N. Secretary-General's Brother Kobina Annan May Have Played a Role in Oil-for-Food Scandal

By Claudia Rosett
The New York Sun
August 15, 2005

U.N. Secretary-General's Brother Kobina Annan May Have Played a Role in Oil-for-Food Scandal To the cast of characters caught up in the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, investigators have reportedly added another name, that of the secretary-general's brother, Kobina Annan.

That means at least three members of the Annan clan are now under scrutiny, including Secretary-General Annan himself, his globetrotting son, Kojo Annan, and his brother, who is Ghana's ambassador to Morocco.

This latest news comes from London, where the Sunday Times's Robert Winnett reported yesterday that the U.N.-authorized investigation into oil for food, led by a former chairman of the Federal Reserve board, Paul Volcker, is looking into suspected business connections between Kobina Annan and a family friend, Ghanaian businessman Michael Wilson.

Details of the Kobina Annan angle in the oil-for-food investigations are not yet clear. But this latest news in the scandal already tagged by some as Kofigate looks likely to intensify the spotlight on the secretary-general's family and on a pattern of family and crony connections at the United Nations. Since early 2004, various investigations into oil-for-food have been finding a latticework of links between U.N. business and families of top U.N. officials.

Mr. Wilson, son of a former Ghanaian diplomat and a family friend of the Annans, who also come from Ghana, has turned up in a number of contexts. Mr. Wilson worked in the 1990s for the Swiss-based inspection firm Cotecna Inspection, which also employed Kojo Annan between 1995 and 1998. Kojo's work as a consultant ended the day Cotecna signed a contract with the U.N. to serve as inspectors of relief imports into Iraq under oil for food. Cotecna then paid Kojo from 1999 until early 2004 for not competing with their business in West Africa.

During Kojo Annan's employment with Cotecna, according to Cotecna internal documents and an interim report issued by the Volcker inquiry earlier this year, Mr. Wilson worked closely with Kojo on various projects, including lobbying in 1998 at the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York for Cotecna's business. Kojo Annan may also be the mysterious "KA" mentioned in a Cotecna memo that turned up recently, describing a meeting with Kofi Annan and his "entourage" in Paris, in late November 1998, as Cotecna was looking for ways to secure the U.N. oil-for-food inspections contract that it won the following month.

Mr. Wilson was the first person at Cotecna whom Kofi Annan contacted upon learning in January 1999 of disclosures in the British press that Kojo Annan had worked for Cotecna. Mr. Wilson later served on the board of a private company, Air Harbour Technologies, where Kojo Annan and one of Kofi Annan's closest U.N. advisers, Maurice Strong, who was then an undersecretary-general, also at various times held directorships.

This latest news raises more questions about the secretary-general himself, who has by turns professed ignorance, shock, disappointment - or refused comment - following each in the series of press disclosures over the past year and a half in which suspect U.N. business links converge on his doorstep. This past April, The New York Sun's Benny Avni reported that a New York-based public relations firm, Ruder Finn - which did some paid work for the United Nations, but had also been offering pro bono advice to the secretary-general as he sought to ward off criticism sparked by oil for food - had employed Kofi Annan's nephew, who is the son of Kobina Annan, and shares the same name.

The Moroccan connection, via Kobina Annan's post as ambassador to Morocco, raises questions about links hinted at in a number of previous press dispatches on oil for food. Writing in June 2004, in London's Times, Mr. Winnett reported that investigators were looking into Kojo Annan's alleged role in setting up a deal for a Moroccan company to buy oil from Saddam Hussein's regime in 2001, at a time when all Iraqi oil exports were supposed to be overseen by the U.N. oil-for-food program, a job for which Kofi Annan's secretariat hired the oil inspectors and had oil overseers reporting to the secretary-general's longtime colleague and handpicked head of the program, Benon Sevan. Mr. Sevan was accused last week by the Volcker committee of having accepted more than $147,000 in bribes from Saddam, via a set of intermediaries related to a former U.N. secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

Yet another Moroccan connection linking suspected oil-for-food scams to the immediate circle around Kofi Annan turns up in the case of a former French ambassador to the United Nations, Jean-Bernard Merimee, now one of a number of figures linked to oil for food who are under investigation in France. Mr. Merimee served as France's ambassador to Morocco from 1987-91, as ambassador to the United Nations from 1991-95, and as ambassador to Rome from 1995-98. He then went on to work directly for Kofi Annan, serving from 1999-2002 (during the oil-for-food era) as Mr. Annan's special adviser for European affairs. Mr. Merimee's name appeared last fall in a report of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group as one of those whom Saddam's regime recorded as among secret recipients of Iraqi oil allocations, though in Mr. Merimee's case, the Iraqi documentation shows those allocations, made shortly before the fall of Saddam, were not delivered. Mr. Merimee until recently held a seat on the board of directors of a Moroccan bank. Asked where he might be located, a U.N. spokesman said recently the United Nations has no information. But according to one source in Paris, he is now said to be spending time in Morocco.

In the skein of U.N. family and crony connections, the most clearly exposed scheme to date is that of Mr. Sevan, who according to Mr. Volcker's latest report received tainted money from Saddam, from late 1998 until early 2002, via a nest of business connections involving both in-laws and a cousin of Mr. Boutros-Ghali. By Mr. Volcker's account, Mr. Sevan deposited the bribes in cash into both his own bank accounts in New York and accounts of his wife, Micheline Sevan, who also worked at the United Nations. Mr. Sevan then reported the money on his U.N. disclosure forms as gifts from his aunt - since deceased - in Cyprus, where Mr. Sevan is now believed to be.

Then there's the case of Mr. Strong, one of Kofi Annan's closest advisers, who took a leading role in designing Mr. Annan's 1997 U.N. reforms. These included consolidating oil-for-food management into one office at U.N. headquarters in October, 1997 and appointing Mr. Sevan to run it. Mr. Strong left the United Nations earlier this year, after it was discovered that against U.N. regulations he had employed his stepdaughter, Kristina Mayo, in his U.N. office and failed to disclose this relationship.

On top of that there was the news earlier this year that one of Mr. Strong's contacts in his role as Mr. Annan's personal envoy to the Korean peninsula, businessman Tongsun Park, had invested substantial funds in the mid-1990s in a company connected to Mr. Strong's son, which soon afterward went out of business. Mr. Park was indicted recently by federal prosecutors who accused him of passing millions from Saddam to unnamed high-ranking U.N. officials.

And in the U.N. Procurement Department, where the Volcker committee reported that Kojo Annan liked to drop by and tinker with the computers while visiting a family friend, Diana Mills-Aryee, whom he called "Auntie," scandal has now enveloped a longtime Russian staffer, Alexander Yakovlev - who was taken into custody and entered a plea last week after the Volcker committee accused him of taking more than $950,000 in bribes related to U.N. procurement deals. Mr. Yakovlev, who was heavily involved in some of the oil-for-food inspections contracts, had his own apparent family conflict of interest outside oil for food, by way of handling some of the world body's business with a company that employed his son, Dmitry Yakovlev.

Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

 

[Annie]

She just keeps it up:

http://www.defenddemocracy.org/in_the_media/in_the_media_show.htm?doc_id=292337

Since the Oil for Food program came to an end in 2003, it has been described--accurately enough--as oil for palaces, oil for terror and oil for fraud. Now it turns out the U.N. relief program in Iraq was also oil for Enron.

Among the great scams of our time, there's a near-poetic inevitability to the convergence of the twain. When I first wrote about Oil for Food on these pages, almost three years ago, the analogy that came instantly to mind was Enron. Lo! Much scandal and many questions later, investigators for Rep. Henry Hyde's International Relations Committee have unearthed documents showing that shortly before Enron imploded in late 2001, the company, among its other deals, was shelling out millions, some of it into Swiss bank accounts, to buy Iraqi crude exported by Saddam under Oil for Food.

Not that Enron did business directly with Saddam's regime in violation of U.N. sanctions, or even did anything clearly illegal. Rather, the tale of its guest appearance in Oil for Food illustrates why in some ways the U.N. scandal dwarfs even Enron. Under cover of Oil for Food, Saddam's system of bribes, payoffs and kickbacks, ultimately totaling billions, ran through chains of often obscure middlemen in places such as Cyprus and Switzerland. Enron shows up on one of the outer spokes of Oil for Food's global web, dealing with a trans-Atlantic crew of companies and characters engaged not only in fraud, but allegedly linked to arms traffic, payoffs to the Kremlin and kickbacks to Saddam's regime. Along the way, this gang did its bit to comply via Oil for Food shipments with Saddam's policy of enforcing the Arab League boycott against Israel.

One of the most telling documents the Hyde committee investigators have come across is a fax addressed to Enron Reserve Acquisition Corp., dated March 27, 2001, and accompanied by U.N. approval papers needed to clear through U.S. customs two shipments of Iraqi oil, worth millions. Named on this fax are three companies that have in recent times become infamous on the Oil for Food investigations circuit: Russia-based Rosnefteimpex; Italy-based Italtech; and Bahamas-based Bayoil Supply and Trading Ltd., owned by a U.S. citizen, David Chalmers, who was also the sole shareholder of a Texas-based company, Bayoil (USA). The arrangement outlined in the fax shows that despite a mandate to minimize middlemen, U.N. Oil for Food officials had approved the sale of oil by Saddam's regime to Rosnefteimpex and Italtech. These companies in turn had sold their oil allocations to Bayoil, which was busy in this instance completing one of several onward sales to Enron.

Larded into such deals were rich opportunities for corruption. Under Oil for Food, U.N. officials set the price for Iraq's oil artificially low, and the U.N. let Saddam pick the oil buyers. From this mix flowed the scams in which Saddam's chosen dealers made fat profits, which effectively translated into payoffs. Out of these, some of the buyers paid kickbacks to Saddam's regime.

Rosnefteimpex was accused in May by Senate investigators of having served as a conduit for Saddam to send payoffs to members of the Russian Presidential Council, which advises Vladimir Putin. Russian officials have denied this. Italtech was run by a Chilean-Italian, Augusto Giangrandi, whose history included procuring cluster bombs for Saddam's regime in the 1980s. During the Oil for Food era, Mr. Giangrandi's connections in Baghdad were good enough that Italtech ranked among the top 20 out of the more than 160 select buyers of Saddam's oil under the program, clocking up $846 million in purchases. Mr. Giangrandi had as a business partner the owner of Bayoil, Mr. Chalmers, who also did business with Saddam's regime via Oil for Food. In April, Mr. Chalmers, along with his Bayoil companies in both Texas and the Bahamas, was indicted by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for "Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud and Engage in Prohibited Financial Transactions with Iraq." He has pleaded not guilty.

The trio of Rosnefteimpex (with its alleged kickback links to the Kremlin), Italtech (with its niche in Baghdad and history in the weapons trade) and Bayoil (later indicted for fraud and sanctions busting) were a conduit for the sale in 2001 of Iraqi oil into the U.S. And about the time Mr. Chalmers was peddling some of this oil to Enron, he was also--according to the federal indictment--paying kickbacks, via a "foreign company," to Saddam's regime. These kickbacks allegedly went to an Oil for Food contractor, Al Wasel & Babel, based in Dubai, which was designated last year by the U.S. Treasury as a front company for Saddam's regime. Al Wasel & Babel, along with handling hundreds of millions worth of Oil for Food relief sales in which the regime basically did business with itself, also tried to procure a surface-to-air missile system--which could have been used to target U.S. and British planes patrolling the no-fly zones over Iraq.

Layered into this scene is collaboration by Bayoil with Saddam in treating democratic Israel as a pariah state. Mr. Hyde's investigators have discovered a letter, signed by Mr. Giangrandi on Sept. 9, 1999--and duly notarized--which appears to be a document solicited by Saddam's regime as part of the deal for lucrative rights to buy underpriced oil via the U.N. program. "For and on behalf of Bayoil," wrote Mr. Giangrandi. "We herewith confirm never to have sold directly or indirectly to Israel and further confirm that this policy will remain permanently in force during the entire validity of our contract." A fax out of Houston from one of Mr. Chalmers's associates now under indictment, a Bulgarian, Ludmil Dionissiev, stipulates in reference to a 1998 shipment of Iraqi oil that the vessel used "had never traded in Israel."

Overseeing all this was a U.N. where the former head of Oil for Food, Benon Sevan, was evidently on the take from Saddam, and where investigators are still exploring a growing list of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's family and crony business connections to the program. And among those waiting to buy the Kirkuk crude and Basrah light thus filtered in the name of humanitarian aid out of Saddam's Iraq was--could anyone make this stuff up?--Enron.

Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.