The reputation of the United Nations was dealt a severe blow on Monday when an independent inquiry accused one of its most senior officials, Benon Sevan, of corruptly receiving $147 184 to help to facilitate an oil deal.
The inquiry, headed by Paul Volcker, the former chairperson of the US Federal Reserve, recommended that Sevan’s diplomatic immunity be lifted for the ”purposes of a criminal investigation”.
Sevan, a UN official for 40 years, resigned on Sunday ahead of publication of the report. He denies the claims.
A former UN procurement officer, Alexander Yakovlev, who has also resigned, on Monday night pleaded guilty to accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from UN contractors, after the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, waived his diplomatic immunity.
Yakovlev pleaded guilty to conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering and could be sentenced to up to 20 years for each charge, the US attorney general’s office said.
He is accused of collecting almost $950 000 in kickbacks in ventures unrelated to the programme.
The Volcker inquiry began in April last year after claims of corruption and mismanagement by the UN of the Iraq oil-for-food-programme.
Sevan (67) a Turkish Cypriot believed to be in Nicosia, headed the $61-billion project, one of the biggest operations in the UN’s history.
It began in 1996 as an effort to alleviate the worst effects of sanctions on Iraq’s population. It allowed Saddam Hussein to sell some oil in return for food imports. But the programme quickly became abused by Saddam and unscrupulous businessmen, and allegedly by the UN officials.
The investigation suggested a motive for Sevan’s alleged actions, saying that his finances were ”precarious” before he allegedly accepted the bribes between 1998 and 2002. Sevan claimed he was being made the fall guy.
The report’s findings will be welcomed by US congressional members, mainly Republicans, who have been campaigning against Annan and the UN and have been carrying out their own inquiries into the oil-for-food scandal.
Sevan has been in limbo since being accused by Volcker in an interim report in February of having repeatedly asked Iraqis to allocate oil to a particular company.
The report said Sevan, ”corruptly” and in concert with Effraim (Fred) Nadler and Fakhry Abdelnour, both of the African Middle East Petroleum Company, ”derived pecuniary benefit from the programme through cash receipts from the sale of oil allocated by Iraq to Mr Sevan and bought by the African Middle East Petroleum Company. The participants had knowledge that some of the oil was purchased by paying an illegal surcharge to Iraq in violation of UN sanctions and rules of the programme.”
The report said the investigators had discovered evidence that Yakovlev ”secretly participated in a scheme to solicit a bribe from Societe Generale de Surveillance SA, one of the companies that submitted a bid for the oil inspection contract”. The company did not pay any bribe.
Monday’s report is the third in a series of interim releases. Volcker has promised the final report early next month.
The report touched briefly on Annan and his son, Kojo. The inquiry said new e-mails suggesting that Kofi Annan knew more than he had said about his son’s involvement in the programme ”clearly raises further questions” that would be answered in the final report.
Kojo Annan worked for a Swiss company that won one of the Iraq contracts.
The final report is scheduled to be published at one of the worst possible times for Annan. It threatens to overshadow a special UN summit in September, to be attended by heads of government, to discuss UN reform and meeting goals for reducing poverty. – Guardian Unlimited Â