Oil For Food contracts gone like a fart in the wind

[MysteryMeat]

Someone should sell sponsorship for programs like this to paper shredder makers.

http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/19813.htm

[B]U.N. OIL PAPERS VANISH[B]

By NILES LATHEM

April 29, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - The vast majority of the United Nations' oil-for-food contracts in Iraq have mysteriously vanished, crippling investigators trying to uncover fraud in the program, a government report charged yesterday.
The General Accounting Office report, presented at a congressional hearing into the scandal-plagued program, determined that 80 percent of U.N. records had not been turned over.

The world body claims it transferred all information it had - including 3,059 contracts worth about $6.2 billion for delivery of food and other civilian goods to the post-Saddam governing body, the Coalition Provisional Authority.

But the GAO report also found that a database the U.N. transferred to the authority was "unreliable because it contained mathematical and currency errors in calculation of contract costs," the report found.

The GAO findings, which were aired at a hearing of the House International Relations Committee, raise new questions about corruption and mismanagement in the biggest-ever U.N. aid program - and what has been called the biggest financial scandal in history. An earlier GAO report said Saddam ripped off over $10 billion.

Committee Chairman Henry Hyde said the report raised serious concerns - and could have "a potential impact on the reputation and credibility of the United Nations."

"If these charges prove true, some of the obvious victims are those Iraqis who failed to receive needed assistance," Hyde (R-Ill.) said.

"But the damage extends further. The massive windfall resulting from this organized theft allowed Saddam to maintain his grip on the country, line his pockets and make companies and countries dance to his tune, with consequences we are still trying to contain."

Investigators are interested in Benon Sevan, the U.N. official who managed the program. Sevan denied wrongdoing after his name appeared on an Iraqi newspaper's list of several officials, businessmen and others who profited from the program.

The oil-for-food program, which the U.N. ran from 1997 until the war, allowed Iraq to sell oil in order to buy food and other civilian goods - thereby easing the sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War.

A former oil-for-food program coordinator testified at yesterday's hearing that in the early stages his U.N. superiors were openly hostile to U.S. efforts to contain Saddam.

"For reasons I have yet to fully understand, several U.N. leaders approached the implementation of the oil-for-food program with more distrust towards the United Kingdom and United States than towards the regime of Saddam Hussein," Michael Soussan said.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan fired back.

"If you read the reports, it looks as if the Saddam regime had nothing to do with it. They did nothing wrong - it was all the U.N.," Annan said.