A Senate panel says it has obtained Iraqi documents providing new
evidence that the former head of the U.N. oil-for-food program made up to $1.2 million
through oil deals with Saddam Hussein’s government.
The staff of the Senate Governmental Affairs investigations subcommittee says the
documents suggest that Benon Sevan didn’t just serve as intermediary in Iraqi oil
sales, as investigators have alleged, but may have benefited financially.
Sevan, who faces U.N. disciplinary charges, has denied any wrongdoing. His lawyer, Eric
Lewis, said, “Benon Sevan never received any oil allocations - period.”
The $64 billion oil-for-food program allowed Saddam’s government to sell oil and use
the proceeds to buy food and other humanitarian items. It is the subject of a series of
investigations because of allegations that Saddam manipulated the program through bribes
and kickbacks.
It's quite apparent that the U.N. is doing their best to divert any serious investigation
of the largest rip-off in history.
In January 2004, the Al Mada newspaper in Baghdad released a list of people, companies and
nations that had been bribed by Saddam's regime through the Oil for Food scam. Among them
was the name of Benon Sevan, the U.N. bureaucrat who headed up the program. The February 3
report says that Sevan asked Iraq for oil allocations for AMEP, a company run by his pal
Fakhry Abdelnour. AMEP got its allocations (totaling about $1.5 million) and some part of
the money resulting from the sale of the oil (thought to be at least $160,000) found its
way into Sevan's pockets. But why?
The Iraqis weren't passing out oil allocations worth millions just to see if they could.
Every bribe Saddam's regime paid was for a purpose. The regime obviously wanted Sevan to
do (or not do) something in return for the bribe. But what? In the thoroughly volckered
report, there's no mention of the motive for the bribe, or the service Sevan did in return
for it. Or even that the "Independent Inquiry" is looking into it. The report
says that Sevan's actions "were ethically improper and seriously undermined the
integrity of the United Nations." Saying Sevan has ethical problems is like saying
the Gambino family has legal issues. Sevan -- who is apparently as crooked as a dog's hind
leg -- may be a sacrificial lamb. The U.N. investigators have no interest in digging into
the reason for the bribe or what Sevan did because it might just lead them to the heart of
the corruption.
The report also criticizes the fact that Sevan was able to ignore the requests of the
U.N.'s internal audit department -- the Office of Internal Oversight Services -- and run
the program without encumbering it with those terribly inconvenient things called checks
and balances. But that, too, is old news. Weeks ago, congressional investigators released
some of the U.N.'s internal audit reports that they had spent a year fighting to get. In
one, dated July 28, 2003, OIOS reported to Sevan, and to the entire U.N. hierarchy, that
Sevan had ignored their requests and had not put in place the audit and oversight
mechanisms that were essential to running a multi-billion dollar program such as Oil for
Food: "Appropriate procedures and internal controls had not been established to
reduce or eliminate" the high-risk parts of the program. Once again, the volckered
report admits only what is old news, and does nothing further.
Stack that July 2003 report up against the U.N.'s statements when the Oil for Food scam
began to attract media attention. On February 18, 2004 – seven months after the
internal audit report showed that Sevan had prevented proper oversight of the program
– Shashi Tharoor, the U.N.'s Undersecretary General for Communications and Public
Information, wrote the following in a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
The [Oil for Food] program itself was managed strictly within the mandate given to [the
U.N.] by the Security Council and was subject to nearly 100 different audits, external and
internal, between 1998 and 2003 and, as the secretary general has said, this produced no
evidence of any wrongdoing by any U.N. official.
That was nonsense when it was written, and it's nonsense now. Last week's report recounts
the findings of the July 2003 report, and does nothing more than repeat its
recommendations. But -- again -- it fails to pursue the motives and consequences: why did
the U.N. hierarchy let the mess in Oil for Food continue? That report was addressed to
Sevan and to Deputy Secretary General Frechette, C. Elfverson, director of the U.N.'s
program oversight office, the U.N. Board of Auditors and others. Why did they all ignore
it and leave Sevan to go his merrily corrupt way? Don't ask Mr. Volcker.
IT'S NOT EASY TO THINK ILL of an eminence such as Paul Volcker. But why would a man such
as he put himself in the position of a shill for Kofi Annan and his corrupt crew? The
unfortunate answer came to light a couple of weeks ago in a memo by Nile Gardiner of the
Heritage Foundation.
As Gardiner reports Paul Volcker was, at the time he was appointed to head the
"Independent Inquiry," a director of the United Nations Association of the
United States of America, "UNA-USA," as well as the Business Council for the
United Nations. UNA-USA is a lobbying group that promotes the U.N. to Congress and the
media. The Business Council does the same among the business community. This is an obvious
conflict of interest that completely disqualifies Volcker from running an independent
investigation. It also renders any report of his investigation at best unreliable, and at
worst worthless.
If there's any doubt about the latter, consider this. According to Gardiner's report, one
of the chief donors to UNA-USA and the Business Council for the United Nations was BNP
Paribas, the French bank through which most of the Oil-for-Food-for-Bribes-for-Weapons
program funding flowed. BNP donated more than $100,000 to UNA-USA and the Business Council
in 2002 and 2003, Gardiner reported.
There are plenty of vile quislings running around in the U.N., appeasing terrorists and
bashing democracies. And all the little volckers running around behind them make their
goals so much easier to achieve.
