Posted on 08/10/2004 4:56:46 PM PDT by take
UNITED NATIONS Bribery Inquiry Needs a Year, Its Chief Says
aul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve who heads a United Nations-appointed panel investigating charges of corruption in its oil-for-food program in Iraq, said yesterday that he would need at least $30 million, a staff of 60 and probably another year to determine whether United Nations officials took bribes or engaged in other corruption while administering the huge relief program.
Speaking at a news conference near the panel's temporary offices next to the United Nations, Mr. Volcker said his staff of 50, more than half of them American, has already identified and gained access to about 15 million pages of United Nations records of the program in Baghdad and New York. The panel has also interviewed witnesses and law enforcement authorities in several countries and is opening offices in Baghdad, New York and Paris.
Conceding that the inquiry has gotten off to a slow start given the security situation in Iraq and would take years to complete, he vowed it would be the "definitive" inquiry into how the program, the United Nations' largest relief program, was managed, or mismanaged.
"We're only at the start," Mr. Volcker said, "and a slow start at that." He was accompanied by the panel's other two members, Richard J. Goldstone, a South African judge who was the first prosecutor on the United Nations' war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and Mark Pieth, a Swiss lawyer and expert on bribery and money-laundering.
The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, established the independent committee under pressure in April in response to allegations that United Nations officials and diplomats had taken bribes from Saddam Hussein's government while administering or overseeing the program. A recent report issued in Washington by the Government Accountability Office, formerly the General Accounting Office, accused the Hussein government of having pocketed more than $10 billion from the six-year program, which used $64.2 billion in Iraqi oil sales to pay for food, medicine and other goods from 1997 to 2003.
In February, a document from Iraqi ministries reportedly cited Benon Sevan, the chief of the United Nations office that administered the program, as having received oil allotments himself. Mr. Sevan has denied the charges.
A six-page report and 21-page annex released by the Volcker panel on Monday shed little light on the panel's deliberations. But it did attest to Mr. Volcker's tenacity in securing a Security Council resolution ordering member states to cooperate with his inquiry and a warning issued on June 1 from Mr. Annan to United Nations staff members that efforts to hide, destroy or remove documents relevant to the inquiry "could result in disciplinary action."
Mr. Volcker said his panel had not yet received the original list of oil vouchers supposedly awarded to diplomats and United Nations officials, which was published by an Iraqi newspaper several months ago. Nor had he determined how his panel would vet such documents to see if they were forgeries, he said.
So far, he said, his panel has $4 million for the inquiry, but he said Mr. Annan had promised him whatever he needed.
A year to hide the evidence, silence the stoolies, and "stash the cash," they mean.
Cover-UP
Bribes report 'a year away'
By Marcus Warren in New York
(Filed: 11/08/2004)
The United Nations inquiry into Iraq's oil-for-food programme will need £16 million and another year to establish whether officials were involved in corruption, its head has said.
The investigation into the £36 billion humanitarian aid plan has already gained access to 15 million pages of UN documents in its quest for a "definitive" account of its alleged mismanagement, according to the former United States federal reserve chief Paul Volcker, who is the investigation's chairman.
"If you really wanted to wrap this up, in the sense of chasing down every contractor involved here and what happened to the money, I think we'd be here until the next century," he told a press conference.
Mr Volcker admitted that his panel had still to receive the original list of oil vouchers apparently awarded to diplomats, UN officials and sympathetic foreign politicians by Saddam Hussein's regime and published by an Iraqi newspaper earlier this year.
It was still unclear how investigators would check whether the documents, which listed senior figures from France, Russia and across the Middle East, were forgeries, he added.
According to a recent Bush administration report, the Ba'athist regime harvested more than £5 billion from the programme, which was supposed to pay for food and medicine with Iraqi oil exports
"If you really wanted to wrap this up, in the sense of chasing down every contractor involved here and what happened to the money, I think we'd be here until the next century," he told a press conference.
They can take as much time as they want. The other investigations will be coming out a lot quicker.
This is total BS. Give me a few hundred thousand, access to the files, and Congressional backing, and I'll produce a report in 3 months that is not substantially less valuable than the one our $30 million in hard-earned tax dollars is going to buy us.
Let's See..60 people and 30 million dollars..they each get $500,000.00 per year but have to pay their own expenses..maybe the UN reimburses the expenses for photocopies at $0.50 per page...by the way, who has jurisdition to prosecute? or is this another FYI report?
Volcker just lost any credibility he may have brought to the table..
The U.N. hasn't had ANY credibility for at least the past 20 year...
Defund the U.N... Leave the U.N..
Semper Fi
The trees! What about the trees? And all the global warming from all that paper.
Note to criminals. Observe how the real pros at the UN and government, in general, get away with their crimes.
At the risk of sounding too rligious..Amen to that flyin' swine
That's $500,000 per employee. That's a lot of five star hotels and catered banquets. Then we're going to need another committee to investigate this committee.
THIRTY MILLION AND 60 STAFF.......WHERE DO I SEND MY RESUME?
Wow! The UN gets to pick and pay the guys who investigate it. Gotta be a thief's dream.
LOL It will take at least one year to spend all the incriminating evidence.
Cf. Russia opposes U.N. resolution on oil-for-food program probe:
Volcker was on the Emergency Coalition for U.S. Financial Support of the United Nations which urges that the US "pay its legal obligations to the United Nations and should, in the future, pay its legal obligations on time." Volcker is also on the Board of Directors of the United Nations Association of the United States of America. . .[SNIP]. . .Don't forget Volcker stepped in to try to save Arthur Andersen. . .
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