Scandals: All in the Family? U.N. Practices Under Scrutiny. 
Newsweek

June 27 issue - Scandals in the prewar Iraq Oil-for-Food Program are raising broader questions about how the United Nations does business. One concern: that relatives of top U.N. officials may have benefited from lax sensitivity to U.N. rules on conflicts of interest and nepotism. A blue-ribbon Oil-for-Food inquiry headed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker spotlighted the issue of U.N. family ties. In a public report in March, Volcker's panel examined dealings between Kojo Annan, son of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and Cotecna, a Swiss company hired by the United Nations to enforce Oil-for-Food Program rules.
Kojo, who also held summer jobs at the United Nations' Geneva office in 1992, '93 and '95, is not the only U.N. relative who has been involved in U.N. activities. In public briefings, U.N. spokesmen said one of Kofi Annan's close associates, Canadian businessman and U.N. adviser Maurice Strong, until recently employed a relative, Kristina Mayo, as a staff assistant. In April, Strong, who once held a U.N. under-secretary post and served as Kofi Annan's special envoy to the Korean Peninsula, took a leave from his U.N. activities after his name surfaced in a Justice Department Oil-for-Food inquiry (he has denied any wrongdoing). Later it was found that Mayo, who had worked as an aide in Strong's U.N. office since 2003, was Strong's stepdaughter. The United Nations acknowledged that Mayo resigned after U.N. officials discovered that in response to a question on her job application about whether she was related to other U.N. officials, she had answered no. Neither Strong nor Mayo responded to requests for comment.
Another U.N. official with family ties within the institution is Imran Riza, now a senior political adviser to Kofi Annan's personal representative to southern Lebanon. Until earlier this year, Imran's father, S. Iqbal Riza, was Kofi Annan's long-serving chief of staff, making him one of the United Nations' most powerful bureaucrats. (The elder Riza retired after Volcker's inquiry rebuked him for shredding official files that might have been relevant to the investigation; on Riza's behalf, U.N. spokesmen denied any impropriety.) Three years ago, UNforum, a Web site run by dissident U.N. employees, complained that Riza Senior had arranged for the junior Riza's promotion to his current post. In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, Imran Riza denied that his father had played any role in his employment by or advancement in the United Nations and said that at the time he first joined the U.N. refugee office in Sudan in 1987, there were no rules that prohibited a relative of someone in the Secretariat to be recruited to [a U.N.] agency. Imran noted that if his father had helped him get his job, I don't think that I would have been sent to a duty station which at that time was considered one of the most dangerous ones in the system. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric says it's clear from Imran Riza's record that he had been a very dedicated employee.
The most public face of the conflict-of-interest controversy has been Kojo Annan, who was employed by Cotecna in Nigeria from 1995 to 1997 and stayed on as a part-time paid consultant to the firm before the United Nations hired it. Volcker's report alleged that after Kojo's consultancy with Cotecna became public in 1999, Kojo and Cotecna worked together to conceal the true nature of the company's continuing relationship with him. Kofi Annan denied knowing about his son's consulting deal with Cotecna before 1999, and Volcker concluded that Kojo intentionally deceived his dad about the relationship. A London-based lawyer for Kojo noted that Volcker found no improper influence over the awarding of the Cotecna contract. In a letter to Volcker, Kofi's lawyer, Gregory Craig, said he was gratified that Volcker had found no impropriety regarding how Annan had handled either his personal affairs or U.N. business. But the controversy continued to simmer last week with the leak of an e-mail written by Michael Wilson, a Kojo pal who also worked for Cotecna. In the e-mail, Wilson appears to report that a Cotecna delegation discussed the Iraq oil program with the SG [secretary-general] and his entourage in November 1998. A U.N. spokesman said Kofi Annan and his aides had no recollection of such a discussion; the same London law firm that represents Kojo issued a statement on Wilson's behalf also denying that the meeting mentioned in Wilson's e-mail—or any similar meeting with Kofi Annan—ever took place.
U.N. spokesman Dujarric told NEWSWEEK that U.N. officials try to live by the rules, which are very clear in that one cannot hire a father, mother, son, daughter, brother or sister except where no more qualified candidate is available... The organization has to be extremely vigilant.
—Mark Hosenball
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.