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Maurice Strong, Canada, former senior UN official

Maurice Strong became a wealthy man in the oil and utilities industries in Canada before beginning UN service as the Secretary General of the first UN “Earth Summit” in 1972 in Stockholm, and he then became the Executive Director of the new UN Environment Program from 1973&1975. This led to many other significant involvements with UN programmes and funds over the years, and with the World Bank and UNESCO as well.

His most notable further role was as SecretaryGeneral of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Mr. Strong has also been a senior adviser to UN SecretaryGenerals over four decades, from U Thant to Kofi Annan.

In the late 1990s, although almost 70 years old, he was onsidered by some as a good prospect to become the next
UN SecretaryGeneral.

Any hope that the UN Secretariat might provide pictures for this “Hall of Shame” is clearly a lost cause. But some current ones can be found at www.un.org/sg, “The team”, or others under the person’s full name plus “UN” at Google, “Search.”

UN SecretaryGeneral.

This Hall of Shame entry is a short one, because two analysts have already prepared an up to date and impressively thorough overview of Mr. Strong’s tangled webs of global interests, connections, achievements, intrigues, investments, and advisory roles (please see the article on
Maurice Strong in the IO Watch “Dark Side” feature.)

Mr. Strong is, behind the scenes, probably one of the most influential, enigmatic, and mysterious people in the world. He has been involved in activities in many countries, most recently and extensively in China and North Korea.

The list of his past and present associations, positions, ments runs on and on. He has, for instance, more than 40 honorary n various countries, and many international prizes and awards.

See some of the 2,130,000 entries fr “Maurice Strong” at Google, “Search”. This analysis concentrates on four troubling and damaging aspects of his continual utilization of the UN for his own purposes, taking advantage of its bureaucratic culture of secrecy, its diplomatic immunities, and its global reach.

First, Mr. Strong has firm connections with many people concerned with the UN, including other members of this Hall of Shame, and has been a central figure in a new set of “sort of UN” organizations operating outside normal UN controls (such as they are.)

Mr. Strong was a key reform adviser to Kofi Annan (see the second item below). New UN top manager Alicia Barcena has been a Strong protégé since 1991. Paul Volcker had his own links with Maurice Strong, and while working on a project to sell Canadian nuclear reactors to North Korea, Mr. Strong also worked with a Canadian businessman, Reid Morden, who subsequently served as the operating head of
the Volcker Inquiry into the Iraq Oil for Food programme
scandal (an “independent” group created and defined by Kofi Annan.)

Mr. Strong also helped to bring Mark Malloch Brown, whom he knew from the World Bank, to New York to head the UNDP in 1999. He even worked with Kofi Annan’s son, Kojo, when both were briefly board members of a company called Air Harbour Technologies, put together by the son of Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, once Saudia Arabia’s powerful oil minister.

Mr. Strong’s efforts also emphasize linkages to multinational corporations, global NGOs, and many special commissions. He has especially worked to create and establish taxpayer funded public bureaucracies including those “sort of” inside the UN, and with complicated in kind donations, odd projects, and accounting complexities not subject to UN oversight which he then taps for funding and contacts when he moves on to other projects.

These include in particular a UN chartered University for Peace; a UN Business Council on Sustainable Development, which in 2000 led to the grand “Global Compact” entwining the UN with multinational corporations; and the Turner Foundation.

That organization started with a year by year, $1 billion total pledge from Ted Turner, slowed somewhat as he encountered “wealth issues”, then strengthened again with additional funds from other sources.

Like the Global Compact, the Turner Foundation is a “UN” program, but a “special” one, not subject to Secretariat or General Assembly oversight, and administered out of the SecretaryGeneral’s office with help from an dvisory Board of the UN Fund for International Partnerships (UNFIP.)

The University for Peace is similar, but sits in splendid isolation in SanJose, Cota Rica,although it does have a Nework office.

Second, Kofi Annan picked Mr. Strong as his senior advisor for major Secretariat management reforms in 1997-1998.

However, Mr. Strong’s reforms did not implement the management accountability framework insisted on by the General Assembly in 1993. Instead, they sought greater powers for the Secretary General rather than the General Assembly, “freed up” UN managers, and launched ambitious new efforts, especially interactions with global business.

These reforms, augmented by more such reforms in 2002, were eventually brought to a halt in 2005.

The Oil for Food inquiry forced the Secretariat to admit to “obvious shortcomings” in Secretariat oversight, accountability, and control mechanisms, and also to admit to a decades old, defective, inadequate top management culture, in Mr. Annan’s “Investing in the UN” report of early 2006.

The General Assembly further reiterated in 2006, as it has ever since 1996, that the Secretariat must implement management accountability processes with “rigorous enforcement – without exception – at all levels”.

It also reaffirmed its oversight role and emphasized the need to “ensure greater accountability of the SecretaryGeneral to Member States.”

Thus, implementation of basic UN management accountability reforms was effectively postponed for a decade by Mr. Annan’s and Mr. Strong’s efforts.

See in the IO Watch “Dark side” feature the items on UN, outdated, 2006; UN, hypocrisy, 2006; and UN, reform?, 2006.

Third, Mr. Strong was directly involved in aspects of the Iraq Oil for Food program scandal. He was forced to step down as Kofi Annan’s special envoy to North Korea in April 2005 because of his long standing financial ties to South Korean businessman Tongsun Park, who had been involved in a major “Koreagate” bribery scandal in the 1970s with various US congressmen.

Mr. Park invested $1 million, from Iraqi authorities seeking to buy influence at the UN, in one of Mr. Strong’s many business ventures (which in this case eventually failed.

A long time friend of Mr. Strong says he is “a brilliant visionary and a shockingly bad administrator.”) Park was convicted, and sentenced to five years in prison in February 2007 and forfeiture of $1.2 million for his “very serious crime” in his oil for food role.

Mr. Strong said he did not know the origins of the funds received. However, he had to give up his special envoy post, because he gave his step daughter a UN job contrary to UN staff regulations about hiring immediate family.

See some of the 29,000 entries for “Maurice Strong, oil-for-food” at Google, “Search, as well as those for “Tongsun Park conviction” and “Tongsun Park sentence”.

Fourth, and finally, Mr. Strong’s dynamic worldwide career provides a road map to ambitious others, showing how clever and ambitious people can use UN posts as a springboard to linkages with power figures and funding worldwide, that provide many opportunities to “do well while doing good.”

Kofi Annan, with his six figure “special” UN double pension, new mansions, and $160,000 per speech current earnings, is well launched for retirement success and excess, and Mr. Malloch Brown has already achieved a life peerage in the UK, a UN salary and allowances of some $400,000 of his own (briefly) at the UN, close ties with billionaire George Soros, and a ministerial pot in the government of new UK prime minister Gordon Brown, dealing with UN affairs.

However, neither will ever catch up with Mr. Strong. Mr. Strong’s impressive record, unfortunately, encourages other UN top officials to attempt to use their own UN positions to leverage and obtain some very cushy deals and connections and build their future wealth and VIP status.

Unfortunately, such behavior is a grave detriment to a UN which needs dedicated top leadership that, as new SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki moon has said, is “focused like a laser” on implementing real UN management reform, instead of mere self aggrandizement.

http://www.iowatch.org/strong.pdf