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Oil-for-Food: A second arrest

On August 8, Alexander Yakovlev was arrested after his diplomatic immunity was lifted by the UN:

CNN has a flash report that a former UN official named in the Oil-For-Food scandal has pled guilty to money-laundering and conspiracy charges in New York.

If Yakovlev has pled guilty this quickly to an American indictment, it might mean that he wants to cut a deal. How often does a defendant plead out within hours of his arrest? He may have enough documentation and personal knowledge of the scams to cause many sleepless nights for Benon Sevan and Kofi Annan -- and perhaps a few indictments for them as well.

Well, perhaps Sevan and Annan have yet to be arrested, but another Russian diplomat is in handcuffs:

A Russian diplomat who oversees a powerful budget committee at the United Nations has been arrested and charged with money laundering, the second arrest of a Russian U.N. official in connection with the scandal-plagued oil-for-food program.

The FBI arrested Vladimir Kuznetsov Thursday night at his Bronx home. He is accused by the Justice Department of laundering money that was paid to a U.N. procurement officer who has admitted seeking bribes in exchange for inside information on the oil-for-food program and other U.N. missions.

The UN procurement official was Yakovlev, he apparently has been talking.

Kuznetsov was a powerful official:

Mr. Kuznetsov, 48, is the chairman of the powerful Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, or ACABQ, a 16-member body that reviews and amends the secretary-general's budget proposal before it goes to the full General Assembly.

The UN website still lists Kuznetsov as the Chairman -- he was arrested on Thursday.

Given that the functions of the ACABQ is "examine on behalf of the General Assembly the administrative budgets of the specialized agencies" and "to consider and report to the General Assembly on the auditors’ reports on the accounts of the United Nations and of the specialized agencies", one mystery might be solved. Internal UN audits as early as 2003 revealed problems:

It is not clear if [UN General Secretary Kofi] Annan himself ever read the audit. He has insisted in the past that he was unaware of any problems with the oil-for-food program while it was in operation. He has also denied any conflict of interest with his son’s involvement with Cotecna.

If the head of the ACABQ was in deep in the scandal, then any UN audit and budget is suspect.

Now we wait to see if Kuznetsov fingers someone higher up the foodchain.

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Angry in the Great White North by Steve Janke is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License. Based on a work at stevejanke.com.
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