The spin zone

Almost every headline I've seen about the latest oil-for-food report contains some variation on the phrase, "Kofi Annan cleared of wrongdoing". But Mark Peith, one of the investigators, says this is not the case at all:

The probe into the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal has not cleared UN chief Kofi Annan, an investigator said today.

Mark Pieth rejected Annan’s declaration that the report, released yesterday, exonerated him on the matter of Cotecna Inspections winning a £5 million-a-year UN contract while he was secretary-general and it employed his son Kojo.

“We did not exonerate Kofi Annan,” Pieth said. “We should not brush this off. A certain mea culpa would have been appropriate.”

Pieth, a Swiss university professor of criminal law, also accused Cotecna of repeatedly lying about its links to Annan’s son.
[...]
A key conclusion was that Kofi Annan never interfered in the awarding of the contract to the Swiss company, but should have better investigated possible conflicts of interest after a British newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph, reported the link between Kojo Annan and Cotecna in January 1999.

In an interview with swissinfo.org, Peith says Annan should not be forced to resign, but that he did not take proper action against a probable conflict of interest involving his son. (Headline: "Expert says Annan has no reason to resign".)

I am prepared to believe Kofi Annan was not actively involved in any wrongdoing - but it's an established principle that the leader of a body like the UN should not allow even the appearance of wrongdoing, lest the organization's credibility be damaged. Mind you, there's not much more anyone could do to further damage the UN's image, but this report doesn't help, especially in light of details noted by the Financial Times:

Yesterday's report by the independent Volcker Commission provides fodder both for those who want Mr Annan stay on, and those who would prefer he resign.

On the one hand, the report found no evidence to support the central case against Mr Annan: that he helped steer a contract to Cotecna, an inspection firm, at the behest of his son, Kojo. It also says that Kojo Annan intentionally deceived his father, and that Cotecna disguised its relationship with him.

On the other, it says the UN's chief of staff shredded documents pertaining to the period under investigation, and raises questions about how much Mr Annan knew, and when.

In one case, the inquiry appears to catch Mr Annan in amisstatement. "When the secretary-general was first interviewed by the committee in November 2004, he said that he had not met Elie Massey [Cotecna's owner], prior to the award to Cotecna of the inspection contract."

But the inquiry found that he had met Mr Massey twice. One such meeting was on September 18 1998, the only "private" meeting during a busy period.

"A note to the secretary-general from his assistant makes it clear that it was Kojo Annan who arranged this second meet ing," the inquiry says. In a second interview in January this year, Mr Annan said he remembered both meetings.

The report also cites a number of Annan family ties. Michael Wilson, Cotecna's vice-president for marketing operations in Africa, was a "childhood friend of Kojo Annan from Ghana", and considered Kofi Annan like an "uncle". Mr Wilson's father had been Ghana's ambassador to Switzerland and was a long-standing friend of Kofi Annan, the report said.

If there's any hope of saving the UN, Kofi's gotta go, and an outsider - someone not already tainted by the organization's culture of corruption and incompetence - has to take his place.

Posted by damian at March 30, 2005 09:08 AM