Posted by
on Tuesday, January 16, 2007 7:15:24 PM
This has been a long time coming, and it's about damn time these indictments were handed down. Anyone who's been following Claudia Rosett's superb investigative reporting on the UN's Oil-For Food Scandal knows that today, an indictment in federal court was issued for Benon Sevan and Ephraim Nadler for their complicity and roles in the scandal that ripped off billions from the US and other countries, and hardly ended up where it belonged. Reuters has the news:
A former executive director of the U.N. oil-for-food program for Iraq and a brother-in-law of a former U.N. secretary-general have been charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud tied to the program, a U.S. federal prosecutor said on Tuesday.
Former executive director Benon Sevan, the highest ranking U.N. official to be charged in relation to the program, and Ephraim Nadler, brother-in-law of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, were named in an indictment unsealed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday.
Michael Garcia, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement that Sevan, a Cypriot, allegedly received about $160,000 from Nadler on behalf of the Iraqi government.
Garcia said the United States had issued warrants for the arrest of Nadler and Sevan and will seek their arrest and extradition to New York.
"The allegations in this current indictment that the executive director of the very program that was created to provide humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people was involved in such a scheme demonstrates how pervasive the corruption was and how that corruption undermined the operation of the program," Garcia said.
Claudia adds more:
Concerning the global extravaganza of graft that was the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, Kofi Annan’s line was to blame everyone but the UN itself. “If there was a scandal,” was how he tried to spin it when asked about corruption in his own secretariat. Apparently, U.S. federal prosecutors see it differently. This morning, jointly with the Manhattan DA’s office, they announced the indictment in New York’s Southern District of Annan’s handpicked head of the former Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan, on charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.Also charged is Ephraim Nadler (a.k.a. “Fred Nadler”), a brother-in-law of former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. If that sounds like the UN might be prone to problems at the top, keep going. The web of fathers-sons-sisters-brothers-and-wives is stunning; and there is of course the mystery of the death of Benon Sevan’s pensioner aunt, whom Sevan claimed was the source of the $160,000 that the Feds allege he took in Oil-for-Food pay-offs, and who perished after falling into the elevator shaft of her Cyprus apartment block, just as Oil-for-Food investigations were taking shape in early 2004.
Sevan, who denies any wrong-doing, slipped out of New York in 2005, but has been living in plain sight on Cyprus, where I found him settled into his late aunt’s penthouse apartment when I paid a surprise visit there last March.
This indictment comes nine years after Sevan allegedly took his first payoff on Oil-for-Food deals, and follows years in which top UN officials denied, stonewalled, dismissed and in some cases lied about the extent of abuse within the UN itself. Billions in taxpayer dollars, as well as enormous amounts of trust, are lavished on this institution by our own government. The question today is not only whether Sevan, now facing an Interpol warrant, might decide to cooperate with the laws of the U.S., where — while working at UN headquarters in New York — he is alleged to have banked stacks of Iraq-begotten cash. The larger questions are why Annan and his top aides and advisers felt they could with impunity deflect blame from their own failings and from the UN itself, and why, apart from perhaps Sevan, they have gotten away with it.
A couple of things that I'd like to note. First, he still need to be extradited to New York. Should he actually make it back here, and his lawyers tell him that he's screwed, I'd like every effort made to keep a firearm out of his reach. The one thing that would make this trial anticlimactic is if he commits suicide. He's facing some pretty heavy charges, and they could carry some serious jailtime. (Unless, of course, a deal can be struck where we can nail Kooky Uncle Kofi in this, which would just make me absolutely giddy.) And it should go without saying that if he is brought back to New York, his passport should be confiscated.
Second, the media chose to ignore this scandal for the most part, so it's going to fall to people like Claudia to keep people abreast of the trial. I want people who are interested in this trial to pay close attention as to how the world had the wool pulled over their eyes by the crooks and liars at the UN. Maybe if we pay attention to this trial, we can demand the right reforms int he UN. Of course, I'd prefer we pull out of the organization. as far as I'm concerned, they burned up their last bit of credibility a long time ago, and the UN simply has no place in this world.
Publius II