UN scandal - the plot thickens

From Opinion Journal

'We Have Other Priorities'
Why won't the U.N. answer questions about its Iraq scandal?

BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, May 5, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

The harder the United Nations tries to keep a lid on Oil for Food, the more the scandal keeps boiling over. This past Sunday Secretary-General Kofi Annan appeared on "Meet the Press," rejecting as "outrageous" allegations that this graft-ridden U.N. relief program for Iraq had helped prop up Saddam Hussein's regime, and denying that the U.N. has made any attempt at a coverup. Asked by host Tim Russert why only a portion of the documentation requested of the U.N. by the U.S. General Accounting Office had been turned over, Mr. Annan protested: "We are open. We are transparent."

That sounded lame enough, coming just after Mr. Russert on national TV had flourished in front of Mr. Annan a letter sent by Mr. Annan's own Secretariat on April 14, advising one of the pivotal Oil for Food contractors, Saybolt International--which oversaw Saddam's oil exports--to keep quiet.

Now investigators for the House International Relations Committee have dug up a second hush letter, this one dated April 2, sent by the U.N. to yet another crucial Oil for Food contractor: Cotecna Inspections. This is the company that for the last five years of the seven-year program held the U.N. contract for the sensitive job of authenticating all goods being shipped into Iraq under Oil for Food--and was recommended last October by Oil for Food's executive director, Benon Sevan, for the work it is still doing in Iraq for the Coalition Provisional Authority. (Cotecna is also the company that for the better part of three years before winning its slot in the Oil for Food program, in December, 1998, employed Mr. Annan's son, Kojo Annan, first on staff and then as a consultant, a potential conflict of interest that the U.N. did not declare.)

[...]

In other words, in the interval between March 19, when Mr. Annan finally conceded in the face of overwhelming evidence that the program might after all need investigating by independent experts, and April 21, when former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker was appointed to head to the investigation, Mr. Annan's office explicitly reminded these two crucial contractors, which worked for the Secretariat's Oil for Food program checking the imports and exports involved in more than $100 billion worth of Saddam's oil sales and relief imports, to keep quiet.

There's more.