With the Sopranos going off the air, it’s time someone launched a series based on life at the United Nations. Don’t worry about all that tedious diplomacy — between the cash, real estate, travel, fine dining and family drama there’s more than enough material for a long run of lively seasons. Here’s just a taste:
We now have the verdict, just in, at the Sanjaya Bahel bribery trial in New York’s Southern District — another UN official: Guilty. Over the past three weeks the jury has heard details of how Bahel while running the UN commodity procurement section helped a friend get $100 million worth of UN contracts. In exchange, Bahel got bargain rates on a big, fancy apartment near the UN, cash, travel and a laptop.
This follows the conviction in March of the former head of the UN General Assembly budget oversight committee, Vladimir Kuznetsov, who was found to have been laundering kickbacks obtained by another UN procurement officer, Alexander Yakovlev — who pled guilty in 2005. In a sentimental touch, both these UN officials named their offshore front companies after their children.
The Kuznetsov conviction came hard on the heels of the indictment this past January of the former head of the UN Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan, who despite Kofi Annan’s assurances managed to slip out of New York during the investigations and has been residing, safe from extradition, in a penthouse apartment on Cyprus. Sevan maintains that he is innocent. According to the UN’s own investigation, Sevan used money from Saddam Hussein’s oil deals, picked up in cash from Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s brother-in-law in Switzerland, to bankroll his Manhattan restaurant bills and meet the mortgage payments on a second home in the Hamptons.
Last summer brought the conviction of South Korean businessman Tongsun Park, for conspiring to bribe UN officials on behalf of Saddam’s Iraq to rig Oil-for-Food from the beginning. In that case, court testimony included tales of stacks of cash stuffed into underwear, socks, briefcases and shopping bags — plus a Christmas trip with some of that cash to Las Vegas. Plus, of course, the $988,885 check bankrolled by Baghdad and delivered in 1997 by Park to UN eminence Maurice Strong (mentioned in post below, on UN carbon and corruption offsets), who has not been accused of any wrong-doing and says he is innocent. Maurice Strong turned out, in violation of UN rules, to have been quietly employing his own stepdaughter in his UN office. But since, unlike Paul Wolfowitz, Strong is definitely not an American neo-conservative, apparently that was of no deep interest to the ethicists of the UN system.
Much of the above has come to light via scrutiny from the media and assorted investigations focused chiefly on UN headquarters in New York. The UN also has major offices in places including, to name just a few: Nairobi, Geneva, Vienna, Copenhagen, Bangkok, Addis Ababa and Beirut. Just imagine the possibilities.
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7 Comments
1. Steve-o:Sounds like a real culture of corruption they’ve got there. The Democrats need to hold some hearings. I propose a windfall profits tax on all the ill-gotten gains, with the proceeds awarded to UN rape victims.
Jun 8, 2007 - 1:10 am 2. JunkYardBlog:Sanjaya convicted of bribery; given hotel room with prostitutes
PJM’s Claudia Rosett has the details on Sanjaya and other dastardly criminals. What? U.N. bureaucrat Sanjaya Bahel, of course. His former co-defendant, Nishan Kohli, pleaded guilty to bribery and testified against Bahel, saying he gave his family so mu…
Jun 8, 2007 - 4:03 am 3. Robert Speirs:Or they could all run for office in Louisiana and get elected.
Jun 8, 2007 - 8:40 am 4. Craig:Excellent informative post Claudia!
For the last 3 years, our merry band of United Nihilists (UN) have been on quite a roll. Note: the U.S. contributes 21% of the annual UN operating budget- which is now, more and more, used for bail money.
Jun 8, 2007 - 10:23 am 5. AJ:True Story -
I had the good fortune of sitting next to Sanjay Bahel at a friends wedding.
Small talk led me to ask Bahel, who used to be employed by the Indian Foreign Ministry - Why did you switch to the UN. His reply [brace yourself], “in one word AJ, corruption; I just couldn’t deal with it anymore”.
Jun 8, 2007 - 10:52 am 6. Anthony (Los Angeles):Let’s see now: fiscal corruption, peacekeeper prostitution rings, running cover for terrorists and dictators… Tell me again, why do we preserve the UN?
Oh, wait, I forgot. Someone has to pay for the champagne at all those conferences. How selfish of me.
Jun 8, 2007 - 11:23 am 7. Alex Reed:Hogarth’s School for Grifters // L’École des Hautes Études Daumier, pour escrocs agrégés
Graft. It’s a hard, surreptitious, vampirish, cut throat sort of word, an excrescence, resulting from a disease of the soul, on the body or organization from which it oozes. Just mix up equal parts of corruption, bribery, deceit, greed, and arrogance, and be sure to ditch the old moral compass and any vestige of honesty. And voilà, the UN cocktail. Nothing particularly new in the history of humanity. However, we live in a time and place where graft has reached a byzantine apogee of sorts, its international golden age. Were the denizens of our homegrown empire of graft, Tammany Hall, whisked through time and space from their long ago machinations in the lower reaches of Manhattan to late 20th, early 21st century’s Turtle Bay, they would give out a low whistle of admiration and amazement at the sight of the many refinements worked into the art by the upper echelons at the United Nations HQ and then exported worldwide. Globalizations R Us.
Jun 13, 2007 - 8:23 amWith such crackerjack leadership, the scams, the graft, the deals within deals have proliferated to the point where, as Ms. Rosett noted here some days back (”With a Nod to Orwell and Kafka, How About a Get-Real UN Website?”), it’s hard to keep track. And here I’m talking only about the financial web that she highlights in her current post. I leave to one side, for the moment, the many other UN villainies we have seen come to light: the outright violent crimes of rape and murder, the emergent evidence of UN complicity with dictators and common criminals, the UN voice for human rights contorted by arrogance and hate, the moral failures that have resulted in genocide after genocide, millions gone with the shrug of well-tailored shoulders, and on, and on, all high crimes against humanity that crowd around the doors of the UN.
So, what to do? Ms. Rosett has given us an important suggestion in her “Orwell & Kafka” post: a UN Get Real/Real Deal website that would serve as a great glaring klieg light, in one permanent arena, on all the crimes, scams, bribes, and, yes, horrors, teeming beneath the sleek surface that is sadly all that remains to the UN of its former self. If there is to be a concerted attempt to fix the UN, surely there is a great need for this proposed website. Ms. Rosett was, of course, right: the time has come to keep track of it all in one place, to bear witness in detail. The estimable Eye On the UN website is an invaluable resource of commentary and documentation, treating especially the crucial area of human rights at the UN. If I understood Ms. Rosett’s suggestion in her “Orwell & Kafka” post, the website she proposes would be quite different in organization, substance, investigative approach, and objective, tracking and treating the myriad of investigations/scandals/systemic problems everywhere in evidence at the UN today.
My first reaction, when I read Ms. Rosett’s “Orwell & Kafka” post the other day, was to mock (in my blog comment) the canaille who have stolen the soul of the UN, and who defame the efforts of the many honest and idealistic people at the UN who, against all odds, go each day and try to do the right thing in their work there. By nature and nurture, it was just my intrinsic retort to ridicule such vile creatures and their works. Though it was never my intention, I realize that, to anyone unfamiliar with my operating system, it may have seemed that I was making light of the idea of the website. Not the case at all. On the contrary, I consider it to be a supremely excellent idea, and one that deserves the support of everyone who hopes for a better future for the UN and the world it is supposed to serve.
So, what might the Get Real website include? Here are just a few thoughts that I hope may elicit many others about such a website. Could it perhaps use a really serious relational database to make part of it go, with a different information pod for each family of information, e.g., audits, Cash for Kim, Oil for Food, Evaporated Tsunami Relief, UNDP, UNICEF, Peacekeepers, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Staff Union concerns, etc., etc. It would need different layouts for charts and graphs, and perhaps a linear timeline for each pod of information as it develops. Lots of charts, graphs, timelines would help people get a handle on the complexity of each area of investigation. It would be cool to have a spatial matrix, a sort of connect the dots view, to show the connections between different personages involved in the various areas of investigation. There could be a front page section for new investigative reports about the various developing lines/areas of interest. There could be a section for anonymous upload of documents and information from staff, etc.
Any suggestions about content? About how the content might be presented? About what foundations might be interested in funding it? Let’s all think about it together.