NYTimes For the complete version.
Tear Down This U.N. Stonewall
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: June 14, 2004
The secretary general of the U.N. tapped me on the shoulder at a recent luncheon and said, "May I have a word with you?"
Because several columns of mine zapped the U.N. for its cover-up of the costliest financial rip-off in history — even calling it "Kofigate" — I braced myself for an icy rebuke. But Kofi Annan assured me, in his courteous way, that the committee he had appointed to look into the oil-for-food scandal, headed by former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, would do a thorough job.
I respectfully asked if this included an inquiry into his own potential conflict of interest: when Annan's son was a consultant to Cotecna Inspections, that Swiss company won the lucrative U.N. contract to monitor the shipments of food and medicine to Saddam's sanctioned regime. Annan revealed that a competitor had protested undue influence in that contract award, and that an internal U.N. report would be delivered to the Volcker committee.
But that was further evidence of corruption containment. When the International Relations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on May 20 requested 55 internal U.N. audit reports on oil-for-food, Annan wrote Chairman Henry Hyde on June 2 that Volcker "believes the policy of the Organization not to release non-public documents is entirely appropriate."
I suggested that the U.N. was using Volcker, a man of spotless reputation, to control all information about the scandal. The secretary general said "I will look into this further and ask Mr. Volcker to call you."
...
This well-meaning financial wizard is determined to resist all investigative competition. "Take BNP Paribas," he says of the French-owned bank central to the financing of the U.N.'s oil-for-food debacle. "Government authorities can get their stuff, but to the extent that they're contractors of the U.N., no bank can give that up without due judicial procedure. That would violate banking law."
Let's advance this story. Two BNP Paribas sources tell me this: in a storage facility in Lower Manhattan, the bank had a large room containing some 5,000 oil-for-food file folders.
Each folder contained a copy of the bank's letter of credit authorized by a U.N. official to pay a contractor for its shipment; a Notice of Arrival monitored by Cotecna at the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr if by ship, or the Jordanian border crossing of Trebil if by truck; and a description of the contract. The original paperwork went to the Rafidain bank in Amman, Jordan; copies of the damning documents are stored by BNP Paribas in New Jersey.
Though the U.N. purchases were supposedly to supply desperate Iraqis with food or medicine, most of this evidence deals with items like construction equipment from Russia, hundreds of Mercedes-Benz limousines from Germany and thousands of bottles of perfume from France.
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Give us the criminals. Put Annan's son, Annan, the leaders of France and Russia on trial!!! Iraqis are tired of giving blood for oil for cash!!! Bush needs to stop bowing his head to international pressure. Let us find out if these are murdering thieves who dared criticize the US.
-Rudey
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