U.N. Family Ties
August 16, 2005; Page A16
The multiple Oil for Food investigations continue apace, and keeping track of them is never easy. But here's one way of making sense of the scandal: It's a friends-and-family package, and, who knows, maybe the international dialing is free.
Oil for Food was established in 1995, when Egyptian diplomat Boutros Boutros-Ghali was U.N. Secretary General. Earlier this year, we learned that one of the companies that profited corruptly from Oil for Food was a Geneva-based oil trading firm called AMEP, which is run by a man named Fakhry Abdelnour, who happens to be Mr. Boutros-Ghali's cousin. Also on the board of AMEP is Efraim Nadler, who is Mr. Boutros-Ghali's brother-in-law. Small world, right?
It gets smaller. Mr. Nadler's close friend is Benon Sevan, the former executive director of the Oil for Food program appointed by current Secretary General Kofi Annan. Last week, Paul Volcker's inquiry accused Mr. Sevan of steering oil allocations to AMEP and secretly partaking of the profits. Mr. Sevan, who protests his innocence, has beseeched Mr. Annan to come to his aid based on their many years of friendship.
Mr. Annan may have his own friends-and-family plan. On Sunday, the Times of London reported that Kobina Annan, Ghana's ambassador to Morocco and the Secretary General's brother, is being investigated by Mr. Volcker in connection with business dealings he had with Michael Wilson. Mr. Wilson is an Annan-family friend and former executive at the Geneva-based company Cotecna, which in December 1998 was improperly awarded a lucrative Oil for Food contract. At the time, Cotecna employed Mr. Annan's son Kojo, whom it eventually paid as much as $484,000, largely in disguised deposits after he had left the company.
Also close to Mr. Annan is Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman who resigned as a U.N. undersecretary general last month when it emerged that he'd given his stepdaughter a U.N. job. And while we're talking nepotism, let's not forget Alexander Yakovlev. The former U.N. procurement officer, arrested last week for taking $1 million in bribes, had already been dismissed for arranging a job for his son with a U.N. contractor.
The pattern of rampant family favors here is certainly startling, even by political standards, and deserves to be probed as one possible reason that the U.N. failed to stop Saddam Hussein from rigging Oil for Food to serve his own purposes. Mr. Annan came to office promising to do away with this kind of behavior. Instead, he seems to be an emblem of it.