A New York Times (of all places) story outlines yet another example of U.N. malfeasance and fraud and criminal activity under investigation.
This time its at the World Meteorological Organization—the U.N. weather division. Bet you didn’t know they had such a thing! Of course they do. Their budget is $75 MILLION per year and they have a staff of 350.
An accountant working late one night in July 2003 at the United Nations-affiliated weather agency in Geneva spotted a check that he had signed, but noticed that someone had endorsed it to an unknown third party, one L. Khalil. The accountant’s curiosity was piqued, and he began nosing around.
“Within half an hour I had found about 25 checks worth about $400,000 that had not gone to where they were supposed to go,” said the accountant, Luckson Ngwira.
That led to a formal audit and a continuing criminal investigation by Swiss authorities at the sleepy agency, focusing on allegations of embezzlement of training funds by Muhammad Hassan, a Sudanese employee who controlled that money. Investigators allege in documents and interviews that Mr. Hassan stole as much as $3 million over three or four years.
This might be a simple embezzlement case, except that in addition to the money, Mr. Hassan is missing as well. A woman claiming to be Mr. Hassan’s wife filed a death certificate, which Sudanese officials have told investigators is fake.
As if issuing a heads up to the world and an invitation to keep digging, the story concludes with this rather ominous remark:
According to one State Department cable, the legal adviser, Iwona Rummel-Bulska, recently told American diplomats in Geneva that “while bad,” the weather agency’s internal procedures were “not the worst seen in the U.N. family of organizations.”
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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