London police probe UN-Congo charity deal
By Michael Peel 
October 6, 2008
Financial Times
Original Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/040a8346-932e-11dd-98b5-0000779fd18c.html
City of London police are probing whether a landmark United Nations deal to supply life-saving drugs to Congo was marred by bribery involving two key contractors employed to help prevent corruption.
British and Danish investigators are examining about $1m 
(£563,000, ¬ 725,000) of alleged payments by Denmark s Missionpharma, a leading supplier of generic medicines to poor countries, to a British-registered charity that advised the UN on the project, people familiar with the case said.
The case is being invest
igated by City police’s anti-corruption unit, which was set up two years ago as part of government efforts to counter criticism of Britain’s alleged hypocrisy in calling for poor countries to root out bribery while failing to prosecute the western companies involved in it.
The allegations – surrounding a $34m deal to supply HIV and malaria drugs between 2005 and 2007 to one of the world’s poorest countries – highlight the problems of suspected bribery that still dog multinational companies and humanitarian aid.
The international Global Fund for disease prevention, which financed the project, said it was “deeply concerned that companies or individuals trusted with money provided to save lives in the fight against Aids, tuberculosis and malaria may have abused that trust”.
It added: “We have been working closely with police authorities to unearth any evidence of wrongdoing.”
The police probes in London and Copenhagen have worked jointly since last year on investigating a complex series of transactions suspected of routing the money from Missionpharma to a British bank account linked to World Response, which is registered in the UK as a charity and in the US as a nonprofit organisation, people familiar with the case said.
City police last week arrested Guido Bakker, director of World Response, on money laundering charges, after the earlier arrest of Art Scheffer, the organisation’s president. The men, both Dutch nationals, have been released on bail until next year. 
World Response did not answer a series of questions submitted by the Financial Times to its website.
Neither Mr Bakker nor Mr Scheffer could be reached.
Mr Bakker was the Global Fund’s procurement manager between 2002 and 2004, according to World Response’s website.
The Global Fund said Mr Bakker joined it on secondment from a US non-governmental body, then worked between 2003 and 2005 on a number of short-term engagements and consultancies.
Missionpharma, which has its roots in supplying cheap drugs to missionary clinics associated with Scandinavian churches, has customers in more than 80 countries, including governments, UN agencies and non-governmental organisations.
Kim Ginnerup, Missionpharma’s managing director, confirmed he and his company were under investigation in Denmark, but declined to give details. He denied all wrongdoing and said the way events were unfolding was “a little bit tragic”.
He said: “For more than 30 years, we [have been] a respectable company. So this is really something that has been very unpleasant.”
An article last year in 
the Global Health Council’s magazine described how the Congo project was “harnessing the magic of the marketplace” to deliver help to a country in which the life expectancy is about 50 years and millions of people had died in the deadliest conflict since the second world war.