Posted on 11/13/2004 11:22:24 PM PST by crushelits
UNITED NATIONS -- Benon Sevan, the official accused of improperly receiving lucrative rights to purchase oil from Saddam Hussein's government while he was running the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, discouraged his staff from probing allegations of corruption and helped block efforts by the U.N. anti-corruption unit to assess where the program was vulnerable to abuse, according to senior U.N. officials.
Sevan said that such an assessment would prove too costly and that U.N. member governments bore primary responsibility for policing the program, according to senior U.N. officials and other former program members. He did initiate reviews of possible overcharging on some program contracts, reviews on which the U.N. Security Council took no action.
The disclosures, drawn from interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.N. officials and diplomats, follow a report last month by the top U.S. weapons inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, that Hussein personally approved the allocation of vouchers to Sevan, among about 270 other officials and businessmen, to sell millions of barrels of Iraqi crude at a profit of 10 cents to 35 cents a barrel.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
If the editors of the UK Guardian, Telegraph etc.. complain about being inundated by just 500 letters from Americans... resulting in apologies to all of us they offended.
Think what the FREE REPUBLIC can do about the UN... the power of the keyboard!!! I'll wager my laptop we can get Kofi's attention.
I thought they started in 47? That didn't take long. Makes you wonder why it was founded in the first place.
House of Cards about to collapse.......
The Frogs again...
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