Scapegoating Sevan?
New York Sun Staff Editorial
August 9, 2005
Benon Sevan, former head of the United Nations oil-for-food program, might have thought that his pre-emptive press strategy last week would help defuse the criticism of him anticipated from yesterday's release of the third Volcker report. Mr. Sevan was wrong. His efforts to soften the blow by leaking some of the allegations the Independent Inquiry Committee would level against him was no competition for the report itself.
The committee, headed by the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, unfolds the details of what it calls the illicit activities of Benon Sevan, who headed the United Nations' Office of the Iraq Programme when that agency was responsible for oversight of oil for food. The panel also exposes Mr. Sevan's alleged motive, noting that his bank accounts had been thinly stretched before he apparently received $150,000 in payments from the African Middle East Petroleum Co., a firm which the panel believes Mr. Sevan knew was paying kickbacks to buy oil from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The panel recommended that the United Nations waive Mr. Sevan's diplomatic immunity should the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, decide to press criminal charges, a step the secretary-general, Kofi Annan, took late yesterday.
Mr. Sevan came out swinging against the report late last week, even before it was public. He has asserted his innocence and accused the Volcker panel of focusing on him instead of more senior managers at the United Nations. It would be fine with us if the panel wants to keep going. Although the report implicates the brother-in-law and a cousin of former Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Efraim Nadler and Fakhry Abdelnour, respectively, in Mr. Sevan's alleged wrongdoing, Mr. Boutros-Ghali's name is conspicuously absent.
It's a notable omission, since the oil-for-food program was designed under his watch, and his relatives seem to have benefited by virtue of their connections to the oil company that allegedly paid off Mr. Sevan. By any reckoning, it strikes us that in this complicated corruption story, there is more than enough blame to go around. In its first three reports, the panel has described the tangled web of corruption that ensnared the United Nations in respect of Iraqi oil.
The Volcker commission plans to release another report in the fall. In the meantime, the documented corruption is spreading. Yesterday, the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York announced that Alexander Yakovlev, who worked at the United Nations. from 1993 to 2005, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering charges. This brings matters well beyond Mr. Boutros-Ghali and onto Kofi Annan's watch.
Mr. Annan's defenders point out that all this took place while America had a seat on the Security Council and while an American occupied the post of undersecretary general for management. Maybe. But the fact that it's being unraveled by American prosecutors and lawmakers and journalists and by Mr. Volcker - rather than by Mr. Annan or his aides, who have been preposterously defensive - suggests where the high ground in this story is now, and why Mr. Annan's credibility and the United Nations' are at such a low ebb.