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 missing fingertip offers a clue to Mako Nishimura’s criminal past as one of Japan’s few female yakuza, but after clawing her way out of the underworld, she now spends her days helping other retired gangsters reintegrate into society. The multibillion-dollar yakuza organized crime network has long ruled over Japan’s drug rings, illicit gambling dens and sex trade. In the past few years, the empire has started to crumble as members have dwindled and laws targeting mafia are tightened. An intensifying police crackdown has shrunk yakuza forces nationwide, with their numbers dipping below 20,000 last year for the first time since records
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
Indonesia was to sign an agreement to repatriate two British nationals, including a grandmother languishing on death row for drug-related crimes, an Indonesian government source said yesterday. “The practical arrangement will be signed today. The transfer will be done immediately after the technical side of the transfer is agreed,” the source said, identifying Lindsay Sandiford and 35-year-old Shahab Shahabadi as the people being transferred. Sandiford, a grandmother, was sentenced to death on the island of Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs. Customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom in Sandiford’s suitcase when
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
RSS