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.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS