The UN Security Council and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan will both face sharp criticism for allowing corruption and waste to overwhelm the Iraq oil-for-food program, according to a probe of the US$64 billion operation.
The Independent Inquiry Committee's report, which was to be released yesterday, will fault UN management for allowing former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to manipulate the program.
The committee, led by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, calls for widespread reform to take on such tasks in the future. It questions whether the UN is even capable of running such massive operations.
"Neither the Security Council nor the Secretariat leadership was clearly in command," the preface to the report said. "When things went awry -- and they surely did -- when troublesome conflicts arose between political objectives and administrative effectiveness, decisions were delayed, bungled or simply shunned."
The preface called for four central reforms, including the creation of a chief operating officer at the UN. The UN General Assembly should demand that the changes go into force no later than a year from now, the preface said.
Annan's failure to properly manage the US$64 billion program will be a central focus, but there is no new "smoking gun" linking him to an oil-for-food contract awarded to a Swiss company that employed his son Kojo, said one official with knowledge of the final report.
Meanwhile, the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore and the London-based Financial Times were to report in their editions yesterday that Kojo Annan received more than US$750,000 from oil-trading companies being scrutinized by oil-for-food investigators.
The papers said the payments appeared to be linked to oil deals in West Africa. Kojo Annan's lawyer, Clarissa Amato, denied the payments were connected to oil-for-food, but said Annan was a director of a Nigerian company called Petroleum Projects International.
The Independent Inquiry Committee's report will say the oil-for-food program succeeded in providing minimal standards of nutrition and healthcare for millions of Iraqis trying to cope with tough UN sanctions imposed after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The program let the Iraqi government sell limited -- and eventually unlimited -- amounts of oil, primarily to buy humanitarian goods. But Saddam chose the buyers of Iraqi oil and the sellers of humanitarian goods.
In a bid to curry favor and end sanctions, Saddam allegedly gave former officials, activists, journalists and UN officials vouchers for oil to be resold at a profit.
Volcker's team plans to release a last follow-up report next month that will focus on the companies that did work under oil-for-food. The preface said that "the wholesale corruption" in the program had less to do with the UN itself than these companies, which were manipulated by Saddam.
While the final report is expected to focus on UN problems, officials said it will assign blame more directly. Russia and France, whose companies had major oil-for-food contracts and were considered friendly to Iraq, will come under scrutiny, as will former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Japan is to downgrade its description of ties with China from “one of its most important” in an annual diplomatic report, according to a draft reviewed by Reuters, as relations with Beijing worsen. This year’s Diplomatic Bluebook, which Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is expected to approve next month, would instead describe China as an important neighbor and the relationship as “strategic” and “mutually beneficial.” The draft cites a series of confrontations with Beijing over the past year, including export controls on rare earths, radar lock-ons targeting Japanese military aircraft and increased pressure around Taiwan. The shift in tone underscores a deterioration
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German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) yesterday faced a regional election battle in Rhineland-Palatinate, now held by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Merz’s CDU has enjoyed a narrow poll lead over the SPD — their coalition partners at the national level — who have ruled the mid-sized state for 35 years. Polling third is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which spells a greater threat to the two centrist parties in several state elections in September in the country’s ex-communist east. The picturesque state of Rhineland-Palatinate, bordering France, Belgium and Luxembourg and with a population of about 4 million,
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