New U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon had encouraged U.N. watchers last week when he promised a “an urgent, system-wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the U.N. funds and programmes.†But as the old saying goes; if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Claudia Rosett reports:
....by Monday, Ban was backtracking faster than you can say “ACABQ†— which is the acronym for the U.N. General Assembly’s own budget oversight body, the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions — which Ban was suddenly proposing to use as the overseer of his promised housecleaning.Posted by dan at January 27, 2007 2:24 AMTo call that a huge step backward would be understatement. Among other things, the former chairman of the ACABQ, Vladimir Kuznetsov, was one of two U.N. officials indicted in 2005 on charges of bribery and money-laundering in connection with a highly publicized U.N. procurement scandal. (One, Alexander Yakovlev, pleaded guilty. Kuznetsov has pleaded not guilty, and goes on trial next month in New York federal court).
It was during the time that Kuznetsov held his U.N. budget oversight job that illicit funds were allegedly passing through his secret Caribbean bank account. Somehow, his alleged crimes escaped the ACABQ’s attention.
It is this same ACABQ that Ban now proposes to use as a conduit for handling the inspection of the UNDP’s North Korean unit, which will be carried out not by a truly independent outside auditing firm, but by using the U.N.’s own “external auditors.â€