UN translator admits to visa fraud scam
By Harvey Morris 
March 11, 2008
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a720859c-ef61-11dc-8a17-0000779fd2ac.html
A translator at the United Nations’ New York headquarters has admitted his part in a money-making fraud scheme to obtain US visas for foreign nationals by making false applications on official UN stationery.
The case was the latest of a number of UN-linked scandals that have ended up in the US courts. 
The Manhattan federal court said Vyacheslav Manokhin, a Russian, had pleaded guilty to the fraud in which he used his position at the UN to make it appear the applications were genuine. Vladimir Derevianko, his co-defendant and fellow Russian, also entered a guilty plea.
The fake letters requested visas on behalf of foreigners said to be planning to attend UN conferences in the US. The applicants, who paid thousands of dollars to obtain the visas, neither attended the conferences nor intended to do so, the court said.
Mr Manokhin signed the applications in the name of Leonardo Brackett, a non-existent official at the UN Development Programme, and told callers who rang to check the requests that he was Brackett’s assistant.
Kamiljan Tursunov, who admitted in January to obtaining a visa through Mr Manokhin, said he paid $15,000 to a person in Uzbekistan for the service.
After he entered the US, ostensibly to attend a conference, he moved to Florida where he lived for more than two years.
Mr Derevianko, who fled Ukraine in 1997, was granted asylum in the US in 2004. He successfully argued that criminal charges he faced in Ukraine were fabricated by corrupt government officials in retaliation for the past information he provided in government investigations of official corruption.
The UN waived Mr Manokhin’s diplomatic immunity shortly before he was charged in August last year. 
In October, Vladimir Kuznetsov, formerly the highest-ranking Russian diplomat at the UN, was jailed by a US federal court on money-laundering charges for his part in an illegal scheme to help companies win lucrative UN contracts.
Last week, David Chalmers, a Texas oil executive, was sentenced to two years in jail in the latest prosecution to emerge from the scandal over the UN’s oil-for-food programme in Iraq.
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