WEASEL ALERT - UN "OIL-FOR-FOOLS" SCAM - Audits show rampant Bilking

[EXman]

I just sent a link to JohnKerry in an e-mail hopefully he will respond here.

You all realize that Syria just got off the security council in December. Security ... Syria save us from them more like it.

 

[EXman]

I think I saw Kofi's Son just open a New Gas station down the street called U.N. Oil or something they had cheap gas too
+

 

[GoPackGo]

Originally posted by: rudder
Oil for Food money ending up with Al-Qaeda???

If money did get to Al-Queda...then there is your smoking gun!

 

[EagleKeeper]

The UN was created when the League of Nations failed prior to WWII.

The UN has not become too politicalized.

Replace it with something better that will work for the next 50 years - learning for the past mistakes.

 

[CADsortaGUY]

JohnGalt started a thread for this but it belongs here too

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119116,00.html

UNITED NATIONS ? The office of the senior U.N. official in charge of the scandal-plagued Iraqi oil-for-food (search) program has sent letters to companies involved in the program telling them they should not hand over any documents or information without first clearing it with the United Nations.

According to the letters obtained by Fox News, the companies "should retain and safeguard" any documents related to the program and should provide them to U.N. officials upon request. The letters came from the office of Undersecretary-General Benon V. Sevan (search), though aides signed the letters on his behalf.

One of the letters was sent to a company called Cotecna Inspection S.A. (search), which for five years had the job of authenticating all goods being shipped into Iraq under the oil-for-food program.

It's also the company that once employed the son of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (search). Annan has said his son Kojo stopped working for the company before the Cotecna contract was awarded.

The second letter, dated April 27, was provided to Fox News with the company name hidden. The source who provided the letter said it was one of the hundreds of companies authorized to do business with the oil-for-food program.

Both letters ? as well as a third one made public earlier this week to Saybolt Corp. (search), an inspection agency hired by the United Nations to monitor the loading of Iraqi oil ? remind the companies of their contractual confidentiality agreements. For example, the April 2 Cotecna letter says all documents and data "shall be the property of the United Nations, shall be treated as confidential and shall be delivered only to United Nations authorized officials."

All three of these letters came from Sevan, who ran the oil-for-food program and who is accused of personally profiting $3.5 million through alleged illegal oil transactions.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill expressed concern about the potential conflict of interest, saying that U.N. officials who are themselves being investigated appear to be trying to control the information investigators can access.

"We view our role in many cases as a catalyst. Ultimately, the truth has to be known and the U.N. has to disclose it," said Rep. Christopher Shays (search), R.-Conn. "We can't ignore the serious allegations of malfeasance. The U.N. is under an ominous cloud."

Sen. John Ensign (search), R-Nev., said the most scandalous actions may still be to come.

"We're afraid there could be a major cover-up that could (dwarf) the original scandal," Ensign told Fox News. "We all know in America the cover-up can be worse than the crime and we certainly don't want this covered up ... The United Nations certainly shouldn't be above the law."

CkG

 

[CADsortaGUY]

UN whines it's already "tried and convicted" over Iraq oil scandal

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesman lashed out just a day after the head of a new inquiry into the programme ruled out making public any documents about the case.

"I resent the allegation of a coverup. There's been a lot of irresponsible charges made in the media over the last several weeks about the United Nations," spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

/me hands Eckhard a tissue...

CkG

 

[EagleKeeper]

Usually where there is smoke, there is fire.

 

[SuperTool]

LOL, so Saddam was an Islamic terrorist sympathiser who supported the Russian Christian orthodox church?
That makes a lot of sense Anyways, officials getting kickbacks in the international energy business? Shock and Awe.

 

[CADsortaGUY]

Originally posted by: SuperTool
Anyways, officials getting kickbacks in the international energy business? Shock and Awe.

Wow - is that the new apology line from the left's talking points bulletin: 'How to defend the UN' ?

CkG

 

[burnedout]

From the Wall Street Journal:

We have every confidence Mr. Volcker will lead a thorough investigation, but the public should not be asked to take it on faith that he will be given access to all information and rely on his interpretation alone. As the above-quoted contract makes clear, the Secretary-General has the authority to waive all these confidentiality agreements. The fact that Kofi Annan has chosen instead to pursue a campaign of legal intimidation is a pretty good indication that he intends as much of a whitewash as he can get away with. . . .

If abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers demands an accounting, so too does the world-wide conspiracy of bribery that helped prop up Saddam Hussein's torture-based regime. Now's hardly the time for the White House to be seen demanding anything less than full openness and accountability in any area of its Iraq policy.

Interview with the vacationing Benon Sevan:

I'm not running away, says UN official in oil for food scandal

[...]

Benon Sevan, the official at the centre of the United Nations' oil-for-food scandal, has broken his silence to claim that he is being persecuted after an independent inquiry was ordered into allegations of multi-billion dollar corruption relating to the scheme.

Tracked down on Friday by The Sunday Telegraph to a five-star hotel in his native Cyprus, Mr Sevan said that he was being unfairly persecuted and vowed to "talk plenty" once the inquiry had reported back to the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. . . .

When asked about Mr Sevan's whereabouts in recent weeks, the UN would say only that he was on holiday, pending his retirement in June at the age of 66. He is due to receive a £55,000 annual pension after serving the UN for 40 years.

Now, however, those plans have changed. According to UN officials contacted by The Sunday Telegraph last week, Mr Sevan will stay in office to co-operate with the inquiry by the former US Treasury Secretary, Paul Volcker.

In the deal struck with Mr Annan, Mr Sevan will continue for the next three months and be paid a token $1 (55p) a year as a consultant, while continuing to enjoy diplomatic immunity.

No cover up here. :roll:

Just your usual extension of diplomatic immunity for a retired employee who's in a position to implicate lots of people if he says the wrong thing during testimony.

 

[EXman]

while continuing to enjoy diplomatic immunity.

Kofi is a bastard he gives immunity for him because they pay $1 a year as a consultant that is dirty business. There is no covering up this cover up.

 

[CADsortaGUY]

Originally posted by: burnedout
From the Wall Street Journal:

We have every confidence Mr. Volcker will lead a thorough investigation, but the public should not be asked to take it on faith that he will be given access to all information and rely on his interpretation alone. As the above-quoted contract makes clear, the Secretary-General has the authority to waive all these confidentiality agreements. The fact that Kofi Annan has chosen instead to pursue a campaign of legal intimidation is a pretty good indication that he intends as much of a whitewash as he can get away with. . . .

If abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers demands an accounting, so too does the world-wide conspiracy of bribery that helped prop up Saddam Hussein's torture-based regime. Now's hardly the time for the White House to be seen demanding anything less than full openness and accountability in any area of its Iraq policy.

Interview with the vacationing Benon Sevan:

I'm not running away, says UN official in oil for food scandal

[...]

Benon Sevan, the official at the centre of the United Nations' oil-for-food scandal, has broken his silence to claim that he is being persecuted after an independent inquiry was ordered into allegations of multi-billion dollar corruption relating to the scheme.

Tracked down on Friday by The Sunday Telegraph to a five-star hotel in his native Cyprus, Mr Sevan said that he was being unfairly persecuted and vowed to "talk plenty" once the inquiry had reported back to the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. . . .

When asked about Mr Sevan's whereabouts in recent weeks, the UN would say only that he was on holiday, pending his retirement in June at the age of 66. He is due to receive a £55,000 annual pension after serving the UN for 40 years.

Now, however, those plans have changed. According to UN officials contacted by The Sunday Telegraph last week, Mr Sevan will stay in office to co-operate with the inquiry by the former US Treasury Secretary, Paul Volcker.

In the deal struck with Mr Annan, Mr Sevan will continue for the next three months and be paid a token $1 (55p) a year as a consultant, while continuing to enjoy diplomatic immunity.

No cover up here. :roll:

Just your usual extension of diplomatic immunity for a retired employee who's in a position to implicate lots of people if he says the wrong thing during testimony.

but but but they are already tried and convicted

CkG

 

[SuperTool]

Originally posted by: CADkindaGUY

Originally posted by: SuperTool
Anyways, officials getting kickbacks in the international energy business? Shock and Awe.

Wow - is that the new apology line from the left's talking points bulletin: 'How to defend the UN' ?

CkG

It's the real world. Wake up and smell the coffee (or Kofi )

 

[piasabird]

After this food for oil fiasco, how can the USA ever trust the UN again?

The UN has become an arm of the Anti-American EU Government.

 

[Klixxer]

Originally posted by: piasabird
After this food for oil fiasco, how can the USA ever trust the UN again?

The UN has become an arm of the Anti-American EU Government.

If you are going to say that the EU is Anti-American, you better back it up, was it because EU said that there were no WMD's and didn't want to join Bush's excellent adventure in Iraq?

The war on terror is a global war, and the EU IS involved, the war in Iraq is a fiasco, it was wise leaders who gave Bush the finger.

Regarding the oil for food program, i have read everything about the French and Germans trade, how about the US trade? The biggest importer was, after all, the US.

 

[CADsortaGUY]

UN embarrassed over oil for food scandal

Comments by Edward Luck.

Professor Edward Luck is a specialist on the United Nations. For 30 years he's either worked or studied them, and he spent a decade as president of the UN Association in the US. Professor Luck has no doubts the oil for food program was corrupt.

CkG

 

[Genx87]

You're more optimistic than I. Consider whom you're dealing with.

It has been widely reported for more than five years that Hussein was overtly buying influence in the UN Security Council.

Even after it was revealed without dispute that France and Russia had substantial financial interests in the continued operation of the Oil-for-Food program indefinitely, and even greater interests in the continued existance of the Hussein regime (TotalFinaElf and Lukoil), with zero interest in seeing this lucrative status quo come to an end, it was of course all Bush's fault for failing to get the UN's blessing for war or build a larger coalition.

It would be like expecting a member of Congress to build support among officials in NEVADA for an effort to make gambling illegal. I'm sure that the failure to secure such support would reflect entirely upon that member of Congress and not the sheer lunacy of the expectation. lol!

Even more astounding, our resident US-haters actually "spun" these facts, which they themselves did not dispute, not as evidence that the United Nations Security Council had been compromised, or that opposition to the US and Britain within the UNSC was motivated purely by greed and not by principle, but evidence that the United States and Britain wanted Iraq's oil.

IOW, it was A-OK with them that the United Nations was being used to do the bidding of a murderous tyrant while millions of Iraqis suffered in the extreme - all for oil - as long as it wasn't the US and Britain getting the oil.

Wow. That puts things into perspective.

Not surprisingly, these are usually the same folks who constantly accuse the US of arming Iraq (with Russian and French hardware) and actively supporting the rise of the Hussein regime.

Where else on earth would you find a single person, let alone thousands, who believe the US makes Russian tanks and French air defense installations? Only in America....

You know I really could not have said it better.

Bravo..........

 

[Genx87]

With all due respect, you appear to be trying to divert the thread from the issue at hand. Tcsenter makes the absurd suggestion that the reason the other countries opposed the war is due to their financial ties to Iraq. He blissfully ignores the fact that scores of countries have no apparent financial ties, yet opposed the invasion anyway. It is immaterial if the exact number is 50, or 100, or 150.

You missed the point. France + Russia are on the security council and thus are affored the veto power wielded to them after WWII. The 150 or so other countries are really quite irrelevant when it comes to matters like this. France and Russia were going to veto a final authorization resolution and the reasons are painfully clear. They had under the table dealings with Saddam.

 

[CADsortaGUY]

U.N. Oil Probe Has Seized 20,000 Files

Just some current news on an issue that hasn't gotten much attention.

CkG

 

[CADsortaGUY]

'Oil for palaces' scam casts long shadow across United Nations

San Antonio Express-News

A humanitarian crisis loomed in Iraq in 1995, five years after sanctions were imposed as a result of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and his flouting of U.N. Security Council resolutions. The international community responded with an oil-for-food program administered by the United Nations intended to provide essential food and medicine for the Iraqi people.

Saddam's abuse of this program, ridiculed as "oil for palaces," was well-known. While Iraqi children suffered from malnourishment, Saddam and his sons built ever more elaborate residences.

What hasn't been fully understood was the extent of the program's corruption, the degree to which top-level U.N. employees were complicit in Saddam's fraud, how much money Saddam skimmed from the program and to whom he paid some of it.

The mainstream media have almost completely ignored details of that corruption confirmed by independent investigations conducted by the U.S. Treasury Department and the Iraqi Governing Council.

From 1997 through 2002, oil-for-food generated $67 billion for the Iraqi regime that, according to a study by Nile Gardiner and James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, Saddam was allowed to spend with little oversight from the United Nations. The program sold Iraqi oil at below-market prices, which benefited the recipients of oil contracts, and overpaid for Iraqi imports, which benefited Iraqi suppliers. In return, Saddam demanded and received kickbacks from both groups.

The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates Saddam generated $10.1 billion in illegal revenues from oil smuggling and kickbacks on oil sales through the oil-for-food program. Documents discovered at the Iraqi Oil Ministry indicate some of the program's beneficiaries.

A partial list of 270 "contractors" published in the Iraqi al-Mada newspaper in January include: French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, former French Ambassador to the United Nations Jean-Bernard Merimee, the Communist parties of Russia and the Ukraine, the "director of the Russian President's office," the son of the Syrian defense minister and an anti-war member of the British Parliament.

At this point, those implicated by the al-Mada list have either denied the list's accuracy or, if accurate, any wrongdoing.

Shaker al-Kaffaji, an Iraqi-American identified as a recipient of a contract worth 7 million barrels of Iraqi oil, contributed $400,000 to produce "In Shifting Sands," a documentary by former arms inspector and war opponent Scott Ritter critical of U.S. policy in Iraq.

Between 1996 and 2003, Russian firms did $7.3 billion and French firms $3.7 billion in business under oil-for-food. At the United Nations itself, Assistant Secretary-General Benon V. Sevan, executive director of the oil-for-food program, is listed as receiving 11.5 million barrels of oil. Sevan is taking an extended vacation in advance of his retirement later this month.

Kojo Annan, son of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, worked as a consultant for the Swiss company Cotecna until shortly before it was awarded the lucrative U.N. contract to authenticate goods shipped into Iraq under oil-for-food. Neither the United Nations nor Cotecna acknowledged this conflict of interest.

The further one peels back the oil-for-food program, the more corruption emerges. The attendant impact of that corruption on Security Council votes, media coverage and initiatives to keep Saddam in power cannot be overstated.

Beyond Gardiner and Phillips and their colleague Helle Dale at the Heritage Foundation and Claudia Rosett at the Wall Street Journal, few Americans have taken an interest in the fetid innards of the United Nations and the oil-for-food program.

Under pressure from recent congressional hearings, the wheels of accountability are slowly, reluctantly beginning to creak at the United Nations, the "legitimate" body to which John Kerry, congressional Democrats, European and Arab leaders want the United States to relinquish the rebuilding of Iraq.

That accountability must be complete, the malevolence of the oil-for-food debacle fully revealed before the United Nations is given the opportunity to mangle Iraq again.

Two parties especially deserve a thorough inquiry into the oil-for-food program's misdeeds: the United States, the single largest contributor to the United Nations whose soldiers are being killed in part by insurgents funded by the illicit proceeds of oil-for-food; and the Iraqi people, the program's intended beneficiary.

The anti-war left has claimed that the liberation of Iraq, like the liberation of Afghanistan before it, was motivated by American greed, by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's ties to the oil industry reflected in sweetheart deals for corporate friends. The emerging details of oil-for-food reveal precisely the opposite: Many of those opposed to Iraq's liberation were bought and paid for by Iraqi oil in a corrupt program sanctioned by the United Nations.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
jgurwitz@express-news.net

CkG

 

[CADsortaGUY]

No matter how hard they try - this isn't going to go away....

An internal United Nations audit from 2003 found significant problems with the international organization's Iraqi oil-for-food program, revealing that millions of dollars went unaccounted for.
The 23-page audit by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (search) into the program ? now the subject of an independent probe looking into allegations of abuse ? also revealed problems with the oil-for-food program's administration, specifically with a company that employed Secretary General Kofi Annan's son as it prepared to bid for an oil-for-food contract.

Link to audit report

CkG

 

[burnedout]

Thanks for the updates, CAD. Nope, this one ain't going away.

Claudia Rosett also wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page that was published today.

[...]

One of these reports has now leaked. It concerns the U.N. Secretariat's mishandling of the hiring of inspectors to authenticate the contents of relief shipments into sanctions-bound Iraq. (Obtained by a journalist specializing in the mining industry, Timothy Wood, a copy of this report can be found at www.mineweb.com.)

[...]

There are further critiques, such as "Inadequate understanding" and "Unprofessional conduct" by Cotecna, and "Inadequate coordination" by the U.N. Yet after the report's April 2003 submission--and three months before handing over the reins of Oil-for-Food to the Coalition Provisional Authority--the U.N. Secretariat signed a new $9.79 million contract for Cotecna.

A U.N. spokesman says all the internal audit reports on Oil-for-Food have now been turned over to the U.N.-authorized inquiry headed by former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker. But under terms drawn up by Mr. Annan, Mr. Volcker not only lacks the power of subpoena, but must submit his own report directly to Mr. Annan. And guess who has the final say over what we get to see--or not see. Why, Mr. Annan, of course.

 

[SuperTool]

This attempt to undermine the UN is counterproductive to US national security, since we are going to need their help in Iraq sooner or later.
Neocons don't think we should ask UN for help, so they are burning bridges while they can. Neocons would rather fail without the UN than succeed with it.
They went into Iraq without UN backing, it blew up in their face, and now they are vainly lashing out at the UN because they don't like hearing "I told you so"

 

[CADsortaGUY]

Originally posted by: SuperTool
This attempt to undermine the UN is counterproductive to US national security, since we are going to need their help in Iraq sooner or later.
Neocons don't think we should ask UN for help, so they are burning bridges while they can. Neocons would rather fail without the UN than succeed with it.
They went into Iraq without UN backing, it blew up in their face, and now they are vainly lashing out at the UN because they don't like hearing "I told you so"

or maybe it's libbies and/or "internationalists" who have egg on their face because this corruption came to light. Their vaunted UN was in bed with Saddam? Say it isn't so joe...and hand me that broom...

CkG

 

[SuperTool]

Originally posted by: CADkindaGUY

Originally posted by: SuperTool
This attempt to undermine the UN is counterproductive to US national security, since we are going to need their help in Iraq sooner or later.
Neocons don't think we should ask UN for help, so they are burning bridges while they can. Neocons would rather fail without the UN than succeed with it.
They went into Iraq without UN backing, it blew up in their face, and now they are vainly lashing out at the UN because they don't like hearing "I told you so"

or maybe it's libbies and/or "internationalists" who have egg on their face because this corruption came to light. Their vaunted UN was in bed with Saddam? Say it isn't so joe...and hand me that broom...

CkG

You see lint in other's eye, but miss a log in yours.
At the end of the day, you got to ask yourself, do we need UN's help in Iraq, or do we want to have that burden all to ourselves?