Going back to the beginning of Volcker's falling apart.
February 05, 2005
Where are the hidden audits and reports
Give the reports to the Congressional Committees, stop hiding them
As Mr Volcker wrote in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, the findings “do not make for pleasant reading”. Not so for anti-UN conservatives in America, who are wallowing in Schadenfreude. They had feared a whitewash from the committee, and in anticipation had begun to call into question Mr Volcker’s suitability to investigate the UN. (He had served as a director of UNA-USA, a pro-UN group based in New York.)To achieve the thorough thrashing many Republicans think the UN deserves, five committees in the Republican-controlled Congress are investigating oil-for-food themselves.
They have called for the Volcker committee to share all of its witnesses and evidence with Congressional committees and federal investigators. They complain about the committee’s lack of subpoena power. Mr Volcker has pointed out that national legal jurisdictions, including America’s, cannot penetrate the UN’s diplomatic immunity. However, the UN said on Thursday that it would take immunity away from any member of staff thought to have committed criminal acts.
But the organisation clearly feels it has been unfairly singled out. In his BBC interview, Mr Malloch Brown claimed that some $21 billion in total went missing thanks to oil-related smuggling and the like during the Saddam era, and that the oil-for-food programme accounted for only a small fraction of that. Much of the rest, he said, was dodgy dealing condoned by the governments of America and other countries. The UN's critics thus “need to look closer to home”.
Benon Sevan, helped steer oil contracts to a relative of Boutros-Ghali. |
