Kofi's Accountability
If he were a CEO, he'd be out on his ear.

Wednesday, March 30, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Following yesterday's publication of Paul Volcker's second interim report on the U.N.'s Oil for Food program, Kofi Annan issued a statement saying the inquiry has cleared me of any wrongdoing. Later, asked if had any plans to resign, he answered, Hell no! Question for the Secretary General: How do you define wrongdoing? 
In the narrowest sense, Mr. Volcker's Committee found no evidence that the Secretary General influenced the U.N.'s 1998 selection of Swiss inspections company Cotecna for an Oil for Food contract. It also found that the evidence is not reasonably sufficient to show that the Secretary-General knew that Cotecna had submitted a bid on the humanitarian inspection contract in 1998. 
In a broader sense, however, what Mr. Volcker's report reveals is an adverse finding against the Secretary General: That is, patterns of willful neglect, conflict of interest and incompetence that would have any business CEO out on his ear. 
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Consider just a few salient details that emerge from the 90-page report. In November 2004, Mr. Volcker's Committee asked Mr. Annan if he had ever met Cotecna's owner Elie Massey prior to the U.N.'s awarding the inspection contract in December 1998. Mr. Annan said he had met Mr. Massey only once, and briefly, in Geneva in late 1999. 
In fact, Mr. Annan had met Mr. Massey twice before the contract was awarded. The first time, in February 1997, he and Mrs. Annan met privately with Mr. Massey and his wife for evening cocktails in Davos, Switzerland, on the sidelines of a meeting of the World Economic Forum. The second time, Mr. Annan met with Mr. Massey privately in his office in New York, apparently to discuss a lottery scheme to raise money for the U.N. 
In a subsequent interview with the Committee, Mr. Annan remembered brief encounters with Mr. Massey, the purposes of which he could not precisely recall. But given that Mr. Annan's schedule in Davos was otherwise cluttered with meetings with world leaders, why would he choose to spend his dinner hour in the company of a relatively obscure businessman, save for the fact that Mr. Annan's son Kojo was employed by him? 
Or consider Mr. Annan's September 1998 luncheon in Durban with Kojo and French businessman Pierre Mouselli. As we reported yesterday--and as the Volcker report confirms--Mr. Mouselli had sought and obtained the meeting with the senior Annan as a prerequisite for going into business with Kojo. In Mr. Mouselli's recollection, he and Kojo discussed Cotecna with the Secretary General, along with their other business plans. 
In his meeting with the Committee, the Secretary General initially acknowledged only a brief encounter with his son and Mr. Mouselli. According to the report, when shown his appointment schedule indicating lunch with 'Kojo & his friend,' the Secretary General stated he did not 'recollect having lunch with Kojo and a friend' and that it was a 'hectic time for me.' The Secretary-General denied that he was present with Kojo Annan and any business associates at any time that Cotecna's business was discussed. 
Since Kojo refuses to cooperate with the Volcker Committee (he calls it part of a broader Republican political agenda), the question of what was discussed at the Durban lunch is a matter of Mr. Mouselli's word against Mr. Annan's. But we have interviewed Mr. Mouselli and find his testimony convincing--more so than a Secretary General whose memory seems repeatedly to have been refreshed by Committee investigators. 
Still, the matter of Mr. Annan's credibility as a witness is almost trivial next to what the report reveals about the U.N.'s mismanagement of the Cotecna bid, which is merely symptomatic of its larger management and conflict-of-interest failures. 
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Throughout Mr. Volcker's investigation, the U.N. has steadfastly maintained that it hired Cotecna because it put in the lowest bid--$499 per man-day rate against $600 for the next-lowest bidder. But as we have previously reported, Cotecna upped its asking price within days of winning the contract without triggering a competitive rebid. Then too, at the time the U.N. awarded the contract to Cotecna Mr. Massey was under criminal investigation by a Swiss magistrate on money laundering charges. 
U.N. procurement officials claim to have been ignorant of Cotecna's legal troubles, despite their having been the subject of a front page story in the New York Times. Yet according to the report, Mr. Annan himself had known of the allegations against Cotecna since 1998, but had been reassured by his son that there was not much to it. And it finds that had there been more than a one day inquiry into 1999 news reports that Kojo worked for Cotecna, it is unlikely that Cotecna would have been rewarded renewals of its U.N. contracts. The man who ordered that perfunctory probe, Mr. Annan's then-chief of staff Iqbal Riza, shredded potentially relevant documents last year. 
What we have summarized here provides merely a taste of the full report, which can be found at http://www.iic-offp.org/documents/InterimReportMar2005.pdf. Anyone who still thinks Mr. Annan has been acquitted of wrongdoing would do well to read it, as would anyone who still believes Mr. Annan is fit to lead the United Nations. 
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