Crying Wolfowitz

Weekly Standard ^ | 19 may 07 | Claudia Rosett

[rellimpank]

For two of Paul Wolfowitz's most prominent critics, Mark Malloch Brown and Ad Melkert, the war over the World Bank presidency could not have come at a better time. Whatever else the ousting of Wolfowitz has achieved, it has done plenty to distract from the North Korea Cash-for-Kim scandal that just four months ago was threatening to engulf the United Nations agency piloted for the past eight years first by Malloch Brown and now largely by Melkert.

That agency is the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP, and especially in light of the U.N. system's sudden interest in ethics, it deserves a lot more attention. Run by Malloch Brown from 1999-2005, the UNDP is now home to Melkert--previously head of the ethics committee at the World Bank--who has worked since early 2006 as its hands-on manager and number two man to the often-traveling administrator, Kemal Dervis.

Despite its generic name, the UNDP is not just any old U.N. agency (or "programme," in U.N. parlance). It is the alpha in the U.N. alphabet soup, the U.N.'s flagship in the developing world. Its administrator is the third-highest-ranking official in the U.N. system, and the UNDP is angling to serve as top boss of all other U.N. agencies in the field

[Ooh-Ah]

Then there's Mark Malloch Brown and the upmarket house he has been renting for years on the suburban New York estate of hedge fund tycoon George Soros--for whom Malloch Brown has now gone to work. Reporters queried Malloch Brown in 2005 about potential conflicts of interest in renting from Soros while running a UNDP that by his own admission was collaborating "extensively" with Soros's network of foundations. Malloch Brown's response was not to provide documentation on what he claimed was an arm's length arrangement. Instead, he denounced reporters for their "bile."

[CutePuppy]

UN Oil For Food Fraud, part deux.