Missing records and bad arithmetic

Apr. 29 - From Niles Lathem of the NY Post, U.N. Oil papers vanish:

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.

Jefferson Morely in The Washington Post has a link-filled news article about the U.N. Oil for Food Program (although most of his links are to news items that bloggers have already covered in Australia, Britain, the U.S. and even Millholland's interview with the Globe and Mail) but also items from Vietnam and the Netherlands.

Morely takes the "Bush needs the U.N. so doesn't welcome a scandal" line but my observations of the President have been that he adheres to a time honoured American custom: Give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves.

(Links from Roger L. Simon post UNSCAM should not be idelogical.)

20:34: And from Instapundit, an article from the Washington Times GAO denied access to oil-for-food audits. The internal audits of the oil for food program were only shown to Benon Sevan and that the GAO request to examine those audits was refused on the basis that they were "internal documents."

I don't know how far this will go, but the U.S. has one advantage:

Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, said he was considering legislation that would tie the U.S. contribution to the U.N.'s budget — 22 percent of the international body's total funding — to cooperation in the oil-for-food probe.

Several Republican lawmakers said the world body's management of the program called into question its competence to help in the political reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq.

To say the least.

Posted by: Debbye at 07:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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