Cyprus Mail, Cyprus
Jan 18 2007
`Sevan indictment a smokescreen for US failure in Iraq’
By Jean Christou
LAWYERS for Benon Sevan, the Cypriot former UN head of the Iraq
oil-for-food-programme, indicted on Tuesday for bribery and
corruption, have accused the US of digging up dirt to hide its own
culpability in the scandal.
`More than a year and a half after Benon Sevan left the United States
to return to his home country, the United States Attorney’s office
has decided to use Mr Sevan as a scapegoat and a distraction from the
United States’ own massive failures and mismanagement in Iraq,’ said
a statement issued late on Tuesday from Sevan’s US lawyer Eric Lewis.
US attorney for New York Michael Garcia announced early on Tuesday
that the United States had lodged a warrant for the arrest Sevan and
Ephraim Nadler, the brother-in-law of former Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and would seek their arrest and extradition.
However, Sevan, 69, is a Cypriot of Armenian descent born and raised
on the island, and Cyprus does not extradite its own citizens.
A spokesman at the US embassy in Nicosia yesterday said: `To the best
of our knowledge no extradition request has been made to the Cypriot
authorities.’
If the US goes ahead with the arrest warrant through Interpol, it
will mean that Sevan will be unable to travel outside Cyprus for fear
of extradition to the US, where he could face up to 50 years in
prison.
An investigation in 2005, the Volcker Report, concluded that Sevan
solicited oil allocations from Saddam Hussein’s regime on behalf of a
trading company between 1998 and 2001, and it raised concerns he may
have received kickbacks for the help.
Sevan, 69, who served a distinguished 40 year-year career working for
the UN, is accused of receiving $160,000 between 1998 and 2000 in a
scandal that involved in total billions of dollars and 2,300
companies.
The inquiry accused Sevan of steering an oil contract to a small
Panama-registered trading firm, netting the firm some $1.5 million.
Sevan has always maintained the $160,000 came from his deceased aunt
in Nicosia, and that he had declared it at the time.
Lewis said Sevan had run a $64 billion programme that delivered food,
medicine and essential infrastructure to the Iraqi people under
nearly impossible conditions.
`In the nearly four years since Mr Sevan turned over the programme’s
assets to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the United States has
done none of these things,’ he said.
`Now the United States government has repackaged the same discredited
allegations made by the Volcker Committee – that Mr Sevan took some
$144,000 in cash, funds that he fully reported as family gifts on his
UN disclosure form beginning more than seven years ago. These
allegations are not only trivial; they are without basis.’
He said Sevan had served the UN for 40 years in some of the most
difficult assignments in the world – including Afghanistan and Iraq.
`Mr Sevan confronted both the Iraqis and members of the Security
Council without fear or favour. He turned over more than $10 billion
to the United States in 2003, money that has effectively vanished and
has not been accounted for since then. Mr Sevan accounted for every
penny of the $64 billion under his control,’ said Lewis.
The lawyer said it was important to note that the indictment did not
charge `because it cannot’ that Sevan ever took any action or failed
to take any action other than in the best interests of the
Oil-For-Food Programme and the United Nations.
`Apparently, however, the US Attorney has simply adopted the Volcker
Committee’s unfounded conclusions,’ Lewis added.
He said the indictment was based only on two cash deposits, one of
$5,000 in August 2001 and $1,200 in January 2002.
`It is ludicrous to contend that in 1999 Mr Sevan disclosed
fictitious gifts from his aunt on his forms in anticipation of
misleading investigators eight years later,’ said Lewis.
`These same baseless allegations were made nearly two years ago,
while Mr Sevan still was working for the UN. No action was taken.
Instead the US government has waited nearly two years to issue a
ceremonial charge long after Mr Sevan’s retirement and return to his
home country. There is no doubt that there has been financial fraud
and ineptitude by the United States in Iraq on an unprecedented
scale, which has significantly contributed to the crisis in Iraq.’
Lewis said that instead of focusing on the `devastating wrongdoing’
in Iraq, the US government has chosen to focus instead on fully
disclosed family gifts from a deceased relative.
`Mr Sevan is being used to distract attention from the political and
humanitarian disaster in Iraq from which the world will not soon
recover,’ he added.