Where it stops peeling nobody knows…. (but there’s a good chance it will be decided by liberals).
In a follow-up to my earlier post (Saddam Made $21B From U.N. Program) about the UN Oil-For-Food program and my questions about it… there’s this new news:
Oil-for-Food Official May Have Blocked Inquiries
Head of U.N. Program in Iraq Accused of Improperly Accepting Purchasing RightsBy Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 14, 2004; Page A26UNITED NATIONS—Benon Sevan, the official accused of improperly receiving lucrative rights to purchase oil from Saddam Hussein’s government while he was running the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, discouraged his staff from probing allegations of corruption and helped block efforts by the U.N. anti-corruption unit to assess where the program was vulnerable to abuse, according to senior U.N. officials.
Sevan said that such an assessment would prove too costly and that U.N. member governments bore primary responsibility for policing the program, according to senior U.N. officials and other former program members. He did initiate reviews of possible overcharging on some program contracts, reviews on which the U.N. Security Council took no action.
The disclosures, drawn from interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.N. officials and diplomats, follow a report last month by the top U.S. weapons inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, that Hussein personally approved the allocation of vouchers to Sevan, among about 270 other officials and businessmen, to sell millions of barrels of Iraqi crude at a profit of 10 cents to 35 cents a barrel.
Evidence that Hussein used the program to raise illicit billions and erode economic sanctions emerged over years, drawing strong criticism of the United Nations from U.S. legislators and conservative groups. The new disclosures provide a view into how the United Nations limited scrutiny of the program from within.
China, France, Russia, Syria and other governments, which represented companies competing for billions of dollars’ worth of business, stalled measures aimed at ending corruption, U.S. Ambassador Patrick F. Kennedy, who tracked the program for more than three years, told a House subcommittee last month.
(My bolding)
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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