UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has chosen the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker to head an independent panel investigating corruption in the UN oil-for-food program, but an objection by Russia may keep him from accepting the job.
UN officials said Friday that Volcker, 76, had been selected for the panel along with Mark Pieth, 50, a Swiss law professor with expertise in investigating money laundering and economic crime, and Richard Goldstone, 65, a South African judge who was chief prosecutor for the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia.
But the nominations stalled Friday when Russia said it would not agree to a Security Council resolution that Volcker said he needed to give him the authority to conduct the wide-ranging inquiry that Annan was seeking.
"We understand the reputation of the secretariat is in question, but we do not think it is possible to adopt a resolution on the basis of mass media reports," said Sergei Trepelkov, spokesman for the Russian mission.
Those reports, published first by an Iraqi newspaper in January and more widely in the international press since then, listed companies and individuals as recipients of illegal allocations of oil. Forty-six of them were Russian, including Vladimir Titorenko, a former Russian ambassador to Baghdad, and Nikolai Ryzhkov, a member of Parliament. In a statement at the time, the Russian Foreign Ministry denied any wrongdoing by Russians.
According to a report by the General Accounting Office in Washington last month, the government of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein skimmed more than US$10 billion from the UN-monitored $67 billion program from 1997 to 2002.
Among those named in documents that emerged in Iraq was Benon Sevan, a career UN official who headed up the oil-for-food program and allegedly accepted oil allotments himself. He has denied the charges in a written statement.
The documents also showed that Kojo Annan, the secretary-general's son, was a consultant for Cotecna, a Swiss company contracted by the program. UN officials say an investigation in January 1999 by Joseph Connor, then the undersecretary general for management, showed that no one handling the contract was aware of the affiliation.
The Security Council began the oil-for-food program in December 1996 to let Iraq sell oil to ease the impact of the sanctions imposed after the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The proceeds were to go for the purchase of food and other goods, but they ended up funding an open bazaar of payoffs, favoritism and kickbacks with systematic smuggling, illegal surcharges and inflated port fees.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS