OIL FOR PALACES (United Nations was his partner in crime)

Shams, scams and Kofi Annan

By ROGER FRANKLIN
Almost a year ago, when kitchen workers at United Nations headquarters walked off the job in a dispute over holiday pay, the cream of the world's diplomats knew just what to do. They thronged to the site's five unattended restaurants and stole everything that wasn't nailed down.

As one witness marvelled after seeing an envoy make off with a baked turkey under one arm and a framed picture under the other, "They were locusts!"

The next day, however, the incident hadn't happened - not officially, anyway. A UN spokesmen swore blind that a senior official, concerned that his colleagues might go hungry, had granted permission for staffers to help themselves. There had been no mass theft, in other words, because after the event, everything was declared free for the taking.

As excuses go, that one had the benefit of brazen originality. With a few simple words, official honesty was once again the order of business inside the glass-fronted monolith overlooking the East River.

If all episodes of pillage were as easy to explain, the UN might not today be facing what is shaping up as the biggest scandal in its chequered history.

This time it isn't cutlery, baked hams and wine-cellar locks that have gone missing, but at least US$11 billion ($17 billion), depending on who is doing the counting - or rather, the guessing, since the UN has been curiously disinclined to investigate where all that money went.

Whatever the sum involved, it vanished from the UN-administered Iraq Oil For Food programme, and unlike last year's petty looting, those at the centre of suspicion aren't lowly bureaucrats but a tight cluster of high-up insiders centred on the office, family and inner circle of Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself.

To understand what happened - or better, what might have happened, because the UN isn't releasing documents and balance sheets - you have to go back to 1996, when the international body set up a system whereby Iraqi oil could reach the market only if the proceeds went to the "humanitarian relief" of the Iraqi people.

Two years later, at the end of 1998, the UN appointed a Swiss company called Cotecna to administer the programme, which would supervise the flow of some US$100 billion ($155 billion) in oil receipts, before it was finally shut down last November, when the UN reluctantly surrendered the job to the US-appointed Iraqi governing council in Baghdad.

What was Cotecna? For one thing, the former employer of Kofi Annan's son, Kojo, who was on the payroll until shortly before the contracts were awarded, when he became a contract consultant.

Cotecna's job involved squaring the income from oil sales against the goods that were allegedly purchased.

If Saddam's Iraq wanted to import ambulances from Saudi Arabia, the contract of sale had to be approved and the incoming goods inspected by Cotecna, as did tens of thousands of other items, from Russian hoes to Belarus welding rods.

In the first year alone, Cotecna pocketed $6 million ($9.3 million) for its services. After that, because the UN isn't saying, its share of the bounty is anybody's guess.

When Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal began looking into the Oil For Food programme, she soon came up with one explanation: Many of the suppliers, like the Jordanian manufacturer of school desks listed on contract records, simply did not exist.

As Rosett has noted, Cotecna was responsible for approving "tens of billions worth of supplies inbound to a regime much interested in smuggling, and evidently accustomed to dealing in bribes and kickbacks". The issue, she explained in one of her painstakingly detailed investigations, was never "whether the monitors were cheap, but whether they were trustworthy".

Evidence of probity, however, is as hard to find as those notional school desks from Amman - or the ultimate destination of the money spent on them. The suspicion is that those deals, perhaps the overwhelming majority, were nothing but scams and shams.

Remember how opponents of the Iraq War kept citing the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children perishing for want of medicines? Well, Oil For Food was supposed to guarantee that those supplies arrived, but apparently few did.

Again, the UN's stonewalling makes it hard to determine exactly how much was fleeced, but there are some tantalising hints.

Before Oil For Food was handed over to Iraq, the UN conducted an urgent, last-minute review of thousands of contracts. Rosett calls it a "house cleaning", but whatever description is used, some 1500 supplier contracts - one in four - were immediately suspended or banned outright from further participation.

So where did the money go? Into Saddam's pocket is a good guess, with lesser amounts creamed off by the operators of front companies, smugglers and, perhaps, even UN officials.

According to the best estimate of the nonpartisan US Government Accounting Office, Oil for Food generated at least $10 billion ($15.4 billion) for Saddam's family and a further $1 billion ($1.54 billion) to pay the 1000-plus UN bureaucrats who were supposed to be keeping it honest.

Again, the focus is on Kofi Annan, who helped to set up Oil For Food in 1997 and installed his close friend and fellow diplomat Benon Sevan as its director.

Last week, with Rosett's ongoing series of exposes igniting a firestorm over the UN, Sevan wasn't answering his phone. According to a UN spokesman, he is using up accumulated leave before his official retirement.

For his part, a po-faced Annan now concedes "it is highly possible there has been quite a lot of wrongdoing", and has authorised an internal investigation.

Neither Rosett nor congressional investigators hold much hope that it will be more than a whitewash - and the UN has other matters that it would much prefer to talk about, starting with a $1.2 billion ($1.86 billion) interest-free loan from Washington to renovate its decaying New York headquarters.

George Bush rejected the request, saying the UN could have the money at the standard interest rate now being charged to American home-buyers.

As all the world knows, Bush doesn't have much of a way with words, which probably helped to keep the communications terse but diplomatic.

If the President was given to wit, he would have told Kofi Annan to get it from Saddam, who owes the UN big-time.

KOFI ANNAN'S CORRUPT ENTERPRISE

April 2, 2004 -- Is the clock ticking on Secretary General Kofi Annan's merry pranks at the United Nations?
Could be.

The rank corruption of the body's Iraqi Oil-for-Food program is bubbling slowly to the surface - promising to ensnare scores of European politicians and businessmen, as well as a gaggle of Annan's Turtle Bay colleagues.

An upcoming audit being prepared by a firm that successfully traced stolen Holocaust-era assets is expected to confirm the names of some 200 people and companies around the world who allegedly were bribed by Saddam's regime.

The list, found in Iraq's Oil Ministry, was first cited by an Iraqi newspaper, al Mada, at the end of January.

Meanwhile, the General Accounting Office estimates that Saddam Hussein skimmed as much as $10.1 billion from the $47 billion program - originally established in 1996 to buy humanitarian supplies for ordinary Iraqis.

Among those expected to be named are the head of the U.N. program, the Russian Communist Party, the PLO and "a French businessman close to President Jacques Chirac."

This, of course, may help explain Chirac's implacable opposition to the dispossession of Saddam a year ago.

And Kofi Annan's longtime pro-Saddam bent, as well.

As Andrew Apostolou notes on the preceeding page, Annan's immortal words - "I think I can do business" with Saddam - take on an entirely new meaning.

This much is clear: Saddam was able to turn the program into a mystery- shrouded tool for sanctions-busting, bribery and international influence-peddling.

The fog began to clear in February after the name of Benon Sevan - the U.N.-appointed executive director of the Oil-for-Food program - appeared on the al Mada list.

According to al Mada, individuals, corporations and political parties on the list received cash-convertible oil vouchers from Saddam.

Sevan apparently was given vouchers for at least 11 million barrels of oil, worth some $3.5 billion. No wonder the program he ran:

* Knowingly collaborated with Saddam's massive violations of the U.N.'s own sanctions.

* Said and did nothing about the Saddam regime's use of Oil-for-Food income to build presidential palaces.

* Ignored huge kickbacks, thereby making itself complicit in Saddam's bribery of foreign leaders, opinion-makers and companies.

* Permitted the regime to cheat Kurds in northern Iraq of billions - money, by the way, that is still unaccounted for.

This much, too, is clear: The vast profits for foreign companies made possible by abuses of the Oil-for-Food program helped buy foreign support for the Baghdad regime.

Saddam made a point of throwing Oil-for-Food business and oil-voucher bribes at contractors from key countries, especially those with vetoes on the Security Council, like France and Russia:

* Forty-six recipients of illegal allocations of oil were Russian companies or individuals - many with links to President Vladimir Putin.

* French interests were so deeply involved in corrupt Oil-for-Food dealings that France opposed the ending of sanctions even after Saddam had fallen.

And the scheme seems to have worked: France, Russia and Germany were all hostile to military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Is it any wonder that Russia and France now oppose independent inquiries into the scam, although Secretary General Kofi Annan - under extreme pressure - has nominally agreed to the idea?

The Iraqi Governing Council has been probing the scam since al Mada first revealed it. The audit, prepared for the council by KPMG and the law firm Freshfield Bruckhaus Deringer, is due in May.

Complicating the effort, however, is the refusal of the BNP Paribas Bank of France to make available critical Oil-for-Food program records.

And U.N. officials in New York have declined to send necessary statements for months.

Yes, the U.N. says an "internal inquiry" is under way.

But, given that Kofi Annan's son Kojo is linked to the scandal, it's not hard to imagine how hard that effort will be pressed.

And though the elder Annan has admitted to the need for an outside inquiry, there's no reason to believe that he - or anyone else at the U.N. - will be even slightly helpful when it counts.

Remember, folks as high-ranking as the president of Indonesia, former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua and pro-Saddam British politician George Galloway are implicated.

These are, after all, people with substantial influence at Turtle Bay.

And there are others - many others - who are similarly situated.

Plus, it has now become undeniable that the folks Kofi Annan had running the program were fully aware of the graft they were enabling.

Indeed, for Kofi Annan to say - as he did last week - that he was agreeing to an investigation "because I don't think we need to have our reputation impugned" is simply laughable.

His own son is part of it.

Here's the bottom line:

A U.N. program that was supposed to help the Iraqi people instead stole from them - and, worse, collaborated with their oppressor.

Those responsible for this colossal theft are international criminals - and the same goes for those who covered for them at the U.N. Secretariat.

The United Nations itself stands bereft of moral authority when it comes to Iraq, and to America's heroic effort to reclaim that tortured nation for its people.

Kofi Annan needs to disappear, and to take his son with him.

Neither Jacques Chirac nor Vladimir Putin possess a shred of decency, so nothing can be expected from them.

But none of them - not Annan, not Chirac, not Putin - has any standing in the debate over Iraq's future.

The same goes for the entire United Nations, as well.

Sit Down Hillary .. You're blocking the TV

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How the United Nations Sold Its Soul to the Devil

Justin Darr, April 1, 2004

If I was an advisor to John Kerry, I would strongly recommend that he begin planning one of his patented flip flops in regard to his position on the United States’ relationship with the United Nations. For the last several months, the latest incarnation of Kerry has demonized President Bush for not gaining the support of the United Nations before the invasion of Iraq.

Kerry has characterized Bush as "reckless," "inept," and "arrogant" for his refusal to bow down at the alter of anti-Americanism and beg a bunch of Eurotrash diplomats for the right to defend the American people from terrorism. Now, as the full extent of the United Nations’ corruption in the Iraqi Oil for Food Program comes to light , perhaps Kerry should change his characterization of Bush to "ethical," "principled," and "defender of freedom."

What a strange coincidence it is that all of the nations that most vehemently opposed the United States’ intervention in Iraq are now the very countries showing up as the chief violators of Iraqi sanctions and recipients of Saddam’s bribe money that he stole from the mouths of the children of Iraq.

France, Russia, Germany and Syria acting unethically is no real surprise to anyone, they would steal their grandmother’s organs while she sleeping if there was a buck in it.

In fact, being sneaky and backstabbing is as much a tradition in many foreign governments as apple pie is here at home (I think the Syria’s national emblem has a Three Card Monty dealer on it, in fact). But the really shocking revelation is the depth of depravity exhibited by United Nations officials in the post Gulf War history of Iraq.

One of many egregious examples of the United Nations’ collusion with Saddam Hussein involves the attempts of the Kurds to gain funds from the Oil for Food Program in order to build and upgrade a series of hospitals in Northern Iraq (after all, the survivors of poison gas attacks do need a degree of follow up care).

What is not widely known is the fact that the United Nations gave Saddam and his Baath Party supporters carte blanche in the dissemination of Oil for Food funds and aid within Iraq.

Talk about the fox watching the chicken coop! It should be no great disclosure to anyone when Saddam and his cronies refused to give any international aid to their political enemies.

The Kurds pleaded their case to the Director of the Oil for Food Program, Assistant Secretary General of the United Nation and Hussein bribe recipient, Benon Sevan.

Mr. Sevan promptly ignored the problem. The Kurds then begged the World Health Organization for help in their plight, who, again, ignored them (Saddam’s money really got around). Finally, as a last resort, the Kurds appealed their case directly to U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who told them to go talk to Benon Sevan and the W.H.O. When informed that the Kurds had already been ignored by these two parties, Annan replied, "I am not going to cast judgments."

However, Annan’s hands off policy in Iraqi issues only applied to oppressed people trying to buy medicine for hospitals. Mr. Annan personally approved over $20 million in aid for an Iraqi "Olympic Sports City," $10 million for sports equipment (both pet projects of the renowned humanitarian, Uday Hussein), $4 million for the Iraqi Ministry of Justice (you know, the guys that ran political dissidents through wood chippers in the public squares), and over $50 million to the infamous Ministry of Information (or Disinformation as the case is) for mobile television and radio broadcasting equipment and to ensure that Al-Jazeera and other members of the press were properly compensated for "keeping it fair" in their reporting. No wonder the administration of the United Nations obstructed the United States so aggressively, we were futzing around with their prize cash cow!

The central issue of the corruption in the United Nations and America’s opponents in the Iraq War is not simply that money changed hands, but what impact these bribes had on international policies and decisions. It is quite evident that all of the rhetoric demonizing the United States as a unilateralist, dangerous, international bully led by a maniac bent on finishing his Daddy’s war and creating an American oil monopoly was nothing more than a blathering smoke screen to cover up the depths of the international community’s immorality and corruption. They sold out the lives of innocent people to a madman just to turn a fast buck, all the while staring smugly down their noses at America when we actually tried to do what was right. When questioned about the abuses of the Oil for Food program, Benon Sevan told a reporter, "Please don’t talk about morals with me."

Why would that be Mr. Sevan?

An honest reply would be, "Because it makes me feel like the evil jerk that I am and wonder what animal’s excrement fills the hole in my body that in other people is occupied by a soul. "

Is it any real wonder that we found no W.M.D. in Iraq? Did the Iraqi bribes reach as far as the U.N. weapons inspectors?

We will probably never know.

The current probe being launched into the Oil for Food Program is being administered directly by Kofi Annan, and France and Russia are already pressuring him to keep the full report confidential. After all, it would be very difficult to continue endlessly patronizing America is the full extent of the U.N.’s duplicity was known.

Sadly, John Kerry still feels that America needs to submit American foreign policy to these bandits for their approval. He claims that if he had been President, then he would have been able to forge a U.N. coalition where failed. How would he have done that? By giving tacit approval to the U.N.’s abuse of the Iraqi people? This might have made America more popular in the court of world opinion, but the cost would have been the values that make America what it is.

International popularity, Mr. Kerry, is not a fair exchange for our souls.

Claudia Rosett did a wonderful job on this last year in the Wall Street Journal. Now the dirt is starting to come out, although I wouldn't hold my breath for the New York Times or the Washington Compost to publish any of this. They only report news that supports their agenda, and it wouldn't support their agenda to admit that the UN is riddled with corruption and incompetence.

I think it's time for President Bush to react to this story. Why are we continuing to pay 25% of the budget of a corrupt, incompetent, tyrannical, anti-American organization? Why is the UN still being allowed to prevent anyone from examining the books on the Oil for Food program?

In all honesty, why would anyone expect anything different from a mob of socialist-thinking bureaucrats.

The U.N. is what it is - a sinkhole of pious blather, amoral conniving, and leech-like parasitism.

Humans deserve better than the modern state-system.

Too bad we'll never see these guys hauled off in shackles and an orange jumpsuit. They are a total disgrace and have all but ruined the UN.

I think President Bush should lend them the $1.2 billion interest free - not for renovations, but to move out of the UN headquarters building.

The third world has control of the U.N., and Clinton allowed it to happen, first and foremost, when he was handing out congressional medals and qudos to the likes of Mandela, and Annan, And freeing the FALN terrorist.

Ops4 God BLess America!

All the libs I told about this didn't want to "hear my lies" about how we weren't the ones starving the children.

Wonder how the jackasses feel today?

Wonder how the jackasses feel today?

They will simply ignore it. The liberals have a theory that if you ignore an uncomfortable fact it will go away. A fact isn't really a fact in their eyes unless it is annointed with liberal acceptance and approval.

What they don't see doesn't exist.

If the NY Times doesn't print it, it never happened.

I would imagine that during the next 4 years of the Bush administration, this will become front page news.

When Bush wins, he will immediately go after the media. The administration will want to castrate the UN as well as the French, Russians and Germans and the media will have no choice but to print and broadcast this.

Names will start appearing. People will have to start answering for this. No wonder the left is so hell bent on removing Bush from office.

There is something huge here and someone is doing everything in their power to bury this.

cough cough Clinton.

"KOFI ANNAN'S CORRUPT ENTERPRISE "

Where did this come from?

FYI.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/861683/posts

Link copied & saved- also, cross-link to these:

-"No Blood for Oil"- Kojo & Kofi: Unbelievable U.N. stories--

Can't say it enough:

Humanitarian Aid is a Liberal myth; there is NO SUCH ANIMAL!

ANY aid provided to people of a repressive regime is just that many more indigenous resources a corrupt regime has freed up for its own use.

Any dictator can tell you, "Give my people food, and I don't have to divert any from my army for them; same with medicine, and other useful supplies. You can't help my people without helping me!"

Emergency disaster aid is a totally different matter; it is ongoing "humanitarian aid" that props up such evil regimes as DPRK, several African countries, etc.

Thanks to "Humanitarian Aid" programs, instead of collapsing, they are still happily oppressing their citizens.

Thanks, I thought I knew much of this at an early date, but I missed those early articles - what you gave me dated to just before the war started in March 2003.

I cringe at every mention of Richardson (this from your link). The bolds are mine. Notice Thomas Pickering at that hearing.

Richardson Senate Testimony on UN
Oil-for-Food Program
(Oil prices will not be affected, says Energy Secretary)

March 17, 1999

Washington -- The U.N.'s oil-for-food program "is a key component of the Administration's Iraq strategy and is, therefore, key to our national security," Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson said March 17.

Secretary Richardson testified at a joint hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Administration proposals to expand the U.N. Oil-for-Food program for Iraq. Also testifying at the hearing was Thomas Pickering, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.

Richardson said the Oil-for-Food program "helps us in three ways":

http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:Do7OPv_jmiYC:www.usembassy-amman.org.jo/3RichOil.html+U.N.%27s+Oil-for-Food+Program&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 53 posted on 03/10/2003 8:38:18 PM PST by kcvl [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]

Take a look at backhoe's link in #17; see how LONG Freepers have been all over this story!