Observer: Charity case
February 07, 2008 
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://search.ft.com/nonFtArticle?id=080207000211&ct=0
Pity the children. The German branch of Unicef, the United Nations' children's agency, has plunged into crisis this week, donors have put away their wallets and even chancellor Angela Merkel is worried.
Germans give a hefty $133m a year to Unicef (compared with, say, $68m from the US) so it is not surprising that Unicef HQ in Geneva is worried about the German scandal.
State prosecutors are looking at whether Dietrich Garlichs, German Unicef's managing director, embezzled donations after auditors said he had struck a lucrative consultancy deal with a former colleague without bothering with a written contract.
Merkel said she wanted the affair sorted out pronto, and Garlichs said at a press conference yesterday he'd made mistakes, but not big ones.
It was, however, Unicef ambassador Sabine Christiansen, Germany's best-known TV talkshow host, who summed up the mood. She said German Unicef's crisis management had been terrible but the problems should be resolved quickly - for the children's sake.