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Last Updated: Monday, 28 March, 2005, 13:32 GMT 14:32 UK
Oil-for-food: Annan’s job on the line
By Paul Reynolds
World Affairs correspondent, BBC News website
The future of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will be on the line with the
publication on Tuesday of a report into the connections between his son,
Kojo, and a company monitoring the Iraqi oil-for-food programme.
The UN leader is already vulnerable
If the report, by a panel headed by Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the
US Federal Reserve, criticises the secretary general, he will come under
renewed pressure to resign, though there is no mechanism to sack him.
His second term runs until the end of next year and he has indicated that he
will not seek an unprecedented third term.
But his aides are hoping that the report will reveal no wrongdoing on Mr
Annan Sr’s part – and that he will survive this episode and go on to lead a
plan to reform the UN laid out in his speech on 21 March.
The issues to be examined by the report, an interim one pending collection
of final figures, are the relationship between Kojo Annan and Swiss company
Cotecna Inspection, and whether Mr Annan himself played any role. He has
denied doing so.
‘Disappointed and surprised’
Cotecna was awarded a contract by the UN in 1998 to monitor the oil-for-food
programme under which Iraq, then under Security Council sanctions, was
allowed to sell oil in order to buy food and medicine.
Cotecna replaced Lloyd’s Register Inspection Ltd as the monitoring agency
checking that only humanitarian supplies were allowed into Iraq.
Interim report into oil-for-food Programme (3.26 MB)
Q&A: Oil-for-food scandal
Annan reform speech
Mr Annan Jr worked for Cotecna before it won the contract, though both he
and the company say that his work was in West Africa and had nothing to do
with Iraq.
A Cotecna spokesman, Seth Goldschlager, was quoted by the Associated Press
on 25 March as saying that Kojo Annan became a consultant to the company
after it was given the UN contract – but that again, this had nothing to do
with oil-for-food.
Kojo Annan was paid the consulting fee, Mr Goldschlager said, after agreeing
not to work for a competing firm in West Africa.
One problem was that Kojo Annan did not tell his father about the continuing
arrangement. Mr Annan himself has said that he was “very disappointed and
surprised” when he learned that his son had continued to be paid by Cotecna
after 1998.
The total amount earned by Kojo Annan was said by the Cotecna spokesman to
be about $365,000.
So far, the revelations about his son have been an embarrassment to Mr Annan
– but the report will indicate whether they become something more serious.
‘Less lynch mob’
The UN leader is already reeling from an earlier report in February by Mr
Volcker that detailed the corruption in the oil-for-food programme.
The report said Benon Sevan’s conduct was “ethically improper”
The Volcker team concluded that the UN official in charge of the programme,
Benon Sevan, from Cyprus, “solicited and received on behalf of AMEP [African
Middle East Petroleum] several million barrels of allocations of oil” from
Iraq and that this “presented a grave and continuing conflict of interest.”
Mr Sevan denied any wrongdoing but Mr Annan said he was “shocked” by the
finding.
It later transpired that funds for Mr Sevan’s legal defence, to the moment
when the Volcker report came out, had themselves come from the residue of
the oil-for-food-project.
The accumulation of scandal and allegation has undermined Mr Annan’s
position.
Some Republicans in the US have been calling for his resignation for some
time. These calls were heightened when Mr Annan, in an interview with the
BBC, called the Iraq invasion “illegal”.
Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman has chaired a Senate committee investing
oil-for-food and said in December: “One conclusion has become abundantly
clear: Kofi Annan should resign.”
Senator Coleman said that his investigation found that “Saddam turned this
programme on its head. Rather than erode his grip on power, the programme
was manipulated by Saddam to line his own pockets and actually strengthen
his position at the expense of the Iraqi people. All of this occurred under
the supposedly vigilant eye of the UN.”
Among Mr Annan’s defenders has been the former British UN ambassador, Lord
David Hannay.
“The United States has many traditions, some good and some bad,” he said.
“The worst of the bad is the lynch mob. The best of the good is due process.
We need more due process and less lynch mob.”