Waiting for the Other Poodle To Drop
Turtle Bay 
By Benny Avni
July 23, 2007
New York Sun
Original Source: http://www.nysun.com/article/58936
Did Prime Minister Brown want to signal that Britain would be more attentive to allies other than America? If that was the rationale behind appointing his friend Mark Malloch Brown to a junior minister's post last month, he may have miscalculated: The only longtime ally of the former U.N. deputy secretary-general is a tycoon whose main claim to fame is breaking the Bank of England — hardly a British-friendly act.
If a British politician's independence is judged by poodleness, Mr. Malloch Brown has long been George Soros's lapdog. Mr. Malloch Brown's spokeswoman, Anne Power, tells me that he has now quit his positions at Mr. Soros's hedge fund, Quantum, and at Mr. Soros's philanthropic organization, the Open Society.
His rental agreement at Mr. Soros's property in Katonah, N.Y., ends next week, Ms. Power added. It would be interesting to see if Mr. Soros's next tenant receives the same $10,000 monthly rental agreement that Mr. Malloch Brown enjoyed, even though the previous tenant paid more and local real estate agents say the mansion could fetch much higher rental fees.
When I first published the news of this cozy living arrangement, Mr. Malloch Brown protested by saying the fact that Mr. Soros is my friend was hardly a secret. The friendship assured Mr. Malloch Brown a lucrative job as soon as he left Turtle Bay, and it is almost as durable as the special relationship between America and Britain.
Lord Malloch Brown of Turtle Bay also has enemies — chief among them is his mouth. The British foreign minister, David Miliband, had to declare that America remains Britain's single most important bilateral ally last week after his junior in the Foreign Ministry, Mr. Malloch Brown, predicted that the two countries will no longer be joined at the hip.
Railing against American neocons — in an interview with one of the only British publications they can suffer, the Daily Telegraph — self-aggrandizing at Mr. Miliband's expense, and projecting his own ideas as government policy, Mr. Malloch Brown turned the gaze of the British press into his past.
One place to look is the current scandal engulfing the U.N. Development Program's North Korea activities. A recent U.N. audit detailed how the agency violated its own rules barring payments in foreign currency and the hiring of local staff assigned to the United Nations by the North Koreans' dear leader, Kim Jong Il. The UNDP Pyongyang program was suspended earlier this year after these and other irregularities emerged in press reports.
Long before Secretary-General Ban ordered an audit that confirmed American suspicions about such rule violations, UNDP's own audits of the Pyongyang office were ignored by the agency's brass, including Mr. Malloch Brown. Allegations of violations were directly brought to the attention of the administrator in 2001 and 2004.
The agency's performance in North Korea was only partially satisfactory, audit specialist Cheryl-Lynne Kulasingham wrote to Mr. Malloch Brown in a September 28, 2004, memo. The attached audit detailed currency payment and staff hiring violations, as well as other deficiencies — the same ones that led to the closure of the Pyongyang office two years later.
Mr. Malloch Brown — who later parachuted into Kofi Annan's inner circle because of his self-professed achievements in enforcing the rules at UNDP — failed to react to these North Korea audits. Similar rule-bending practices plagued other UNDP bureaus throughout his reign as administrator.
It did not stop Mr. Malloch Brown from telling reporters, upon his January 2005 arrival at Turtle Bay that, from then on, any official who breaks even the smallest of staff rules would be fired. One U.N. official, Joseph Stephanides, whose alleged sin was listening to a Security Council member — Britain — on Iraq policy, was immediately sacrificed to demonstrate Mr. Malloch Brown's new tough line. A year later, Mr. Annan apologized to Mr. Stephanides and even gave him a job as an envoy to Eritrea.
Mr. Malloch Brown excels at little-scrutinized institutions. The press showed little interest in covering the inner workings of the World Bank and UNDP when he worked there, allowing him to create an image of an almighty administrator and a stickler for the rules, as well as of being a wizard in press relations. Once he moved to Turtle Bay, at a time it was under the gaze of neocon and other press reporters, that image began to tarnish.