Russian UN diplomat charged with money-laundering
Reuters ^ | 09/02/05 | Irwin Arieff
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Russian U.N. official was arrested in an overnight FBI raid and charged with helping a U.N. procurement officer launder bribes from contractors and taking a share of the money, an indictment said on Friday.
Vladimir Kuznetsov, an official of the Russian Foreign Ministry and the elected chairman of the U.N. General Assembly's budget advisory committee, was taken into custody overnight by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Russian and U.S. officials said on Friday.
He was charged with a single count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to the indictment by U.S. Attorney David Kelley of the federal court for the Southern District of New York.
Sergei Trepelkov, a senior counselor in Moscow's U.N. Mission, said the mission had been told the charges against Kuznetsov were connected to the U.N. humanitarian aid program for Iraq. But the indictment made no mention of this.
Kuznetsov was accused of working with a co-conspirator who was not named but was described as a U.N. procurement officer.
The indictment appears to point to Vladimir Yakovlev, who was arrested and charged last month and pleaded guilty to money laundering and was said to be cooperating with federal investigators.
A U.N.-appointed investigative commission, headed by Paul Volcker, the former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman, said Yakovlev pocketed more than $950,000 from contractors.
Kuznetsov's detention was confirmed by U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, who thanked Secretary-General Kofi Annan for promptly waiving Kuznetsov's diplomatic immunity so the arrest could be made.
"This is now a serious law enforcement matter and we will have no further comment," Bolton said.
According to the indictment, Kuznetsov opened a bank account in the Caribbean island of Antigua and the co-conspirator between 2000 and 2005 transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars in criminal proceeds into that account.
Trepelkov said Russian consular officials were trying to reach U.S. law enforcement authorities for additional details in the case and were also seeking to meet with Kuznetsov.
Kuznetsov had been recommended by several countries for the chairmanship of the General Assembly's Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, and had been elected to the post about three years ago, Trepelkov said.
Committee members are not U.N. employees but the General Assembly allocated money for to pay the chairman, which technically puts him on U.N. staff. Therefore Annan was asked to waive Kuznetsov's immunity, U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said. |
