BBC News
Aug 8 2005

34.stm

Profile: Benon Sevan

Benon Sevan headed the oil-for-food programme from 1997
As former director of the UN’s oil-for-food programme, Benon Sevan is
now caught up in the scandal surrounding the programme for Iraq.
The 67-year-old’s resignation on Sunday ahead of expected allegations
of corruption brings to an end four decades of service with the UN.

Posted to some of the world’s major hotspots, Mr Sevan, who was born
in Nicosia and is of Armenian ancestry, has had a string of key
positions.

In 1988, he was sent to Afghanistan and Pakistan as a special
adviser, monitoring the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan after
nearly a decade of conflict.

The charges are false and you, who have known me all these years,
should know they are false

Benon Sevan

Q&A: Oil-for-food

The following year, he was promoted to assistant secretary general
and the secretary general’s personal envoy to the region, later
heading the humanitarian effort there.

He had also worked extensively in the Middle East, before being
appointed head of the oil-for-food programme in 1997.

In 1985, he was sent on special mission to examine the fate of
prisoners on both sides in the Iran-Iraq war.

And from 1992, as well as his other duties, Mr Sevan served as the
special envoy for missing persons in the Middle East.

Danger postings

His first senior posting to a trouble spot came soon after he joined
the UN Secretariat in 1965.

Mr Sevan was caught up in the UN HQ bombing in Baghdad

>From the end of 1968 to the summer of 1969, he served as an observer
of the controversial final stage of the decolonisation of West Irian
(now Irian Jaya) and its incorporation into Indonesia.

He subsequently worked for two years on the UN development fund for
the region.

And Mr Sevan’s work as the oil-for-food boss also brought danger,
with the official halfway through a televised news conference at the
UN headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August 2003 when a truck bomb
devastated the building, killing 22 people.

The UN special envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was among the
dead.

Mr Sevan, speaking at a ceremony in Baghdad as Mr Mello’s body was
about to be flown out, quoted a US soldier who said the envoy, dying
under the rubble, had told him: “Don’t let them pull the mission
out.”

Oil-for-food accusations

The oil-for-food programme was wound up at the end of 2003, and Mr
Sevan retired in May 2004.

By that time, he had agreed to continue on the UN payroll on a salary
of $1 a year and co-operate with the investigation into corruption in
the programme.

In February, an interim report by Paul Volcker’s panel into the
scandal said Mr Sevan had tried to allocate oil sales from Iraq.

Payments of $160,000, which Mr Sevan said came from his aunt in
Cyprus, have been questioned. The bureaucrat has said the notion he
would risk his career over such a sum when he was administering
billions is incredible.

His resignation ends 40 years of a plethora of roles within the UN,
which also included appointments in the 1990s as deputy head of the
Department of Political Affairs, and assistant secretary general in
the Department of Administration and Management, in charge of the
restructuring of the UN.

Mr Sevan was educated at the Melkonian Institute in Cyprus, and then
studied history and philosophy at Columbia University in New York,
eventually doing a post-graduate degree at the school of
international and public affairs there.

He is married and has a daughter.