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Benon V. Sevan, former director of the scandal plagued Oil for Food Program has left his home in New York and is now in his native Cyprus, say U.N. officials. Sevan returned to his family hone in the city of Nicosia in early June and though he insists he will return to New York, he has refused to give any date. The embattled former U.N. aid chief has been under intensive investigation by a "special panel" headed by former Fed chief Paul Volcker for almost a year. In a preliminary report issued in February, Volcker cast serious doubts on Sevan's...

...The indictments announced by U.S. Attorney David Kelley support what the critics have long been saying: Oil for Food was designed from the beginning, and virtually in plain sight, in a way that allowed skimming and kickback operations to help Saddam Hussein circumvent U.N. sanctions.... The same story described "total anarchy" and "flagrant disregard of U.N. Security Council resolutions" in Oil for Food. A myriad of shady middlemen had moved in after the world's major oil companies shunned Iraq in response to Saddam's widely publicized demand the previous year for illegal kickbacks on oil contracts. This open and flagrant corruption......

The word out of the UK is that poor Kofi Annan is depressed, and may be close to calling it quits. How sad. How did things go so horribly wrong for Kofi? Just a few years ago he was the darling of the world community, taking pot shots at President Bush and the US at will. Dictators and tyrants everywhere loved to hear Kofi tell the world that the war in Iraq was unjust, knowing that If justice came knocking at their door, Kofi would side with them. Now things are getting interesting. First of is the issue with Kofi's...

UNITED NATIONS - After months of denials, the United Nations admitted yesterday that, in an exception to its own rules, it has paid for the legal defense of Benon Sevan. The U.N.'s own investigation panel denounced Mr. Sevan for his central role in the oil-for-food scandal that has engulfed the world body.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker will release a report March 29 on whether the U.N. chief and his son were involved in wrongdoing over the Iraqi oil-for-food program, officials said Monday. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Monday that he had no expectations about the report from Volcker, who is heading an investigation into the troubled program. "I will wait to see the report, which I understand will come out by the end of this month," Annan told reporters. Kojo Annan was employed in Africa by the Swiss company, Cotecna Inspection SA, which had a...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 - The Senate subcommittee on investigations says it has documents showing that the former head of the United Nations oil-for-food aid program may have made as much as $1.2 million personally from illegal oil shipments by Iraq. The officials said in a briefing on Capitol Hill late Monday that they based the conclusion on documents written by the Iraqi Oil Ministry under Saddam Hussein and on reports prepared for the new oil minister after Mr. Hussein was overthrown in 2003. A subcommittee hearing about the oil-for-food program is to take place on Tuesday. An independent investigation...

THE WASHINGTON TIMES A wild thought passes through my mind, which is that maybe Benon Sevan is in fact innocent. Innocent of receiving money directly from his buddy Fakhry Abdelnour, the Egyptian whose company (AMEP — African Middle East Petroleum) wanted some Iraqi chits to permit oil purchases. Benon Sevan was certainly not innocent of using his influence in behalf of his friends and of failing to blow any whistles when suspect contractors were designated to oversee the oil-for-food program, a cover-up for easing the life and enhancing the fortunes of Saddam Hussein. Click to learn more... The U.N. had...

February 07, 2005Suspension of Retired UN Employee Prompts Flurry of Suspensions Worldwide Sevan NEW YORK, New York --- UN Secretary General, Kofi Anan, suspended Benon Sevan today for improprieties related to the multi-billion dollar oil-for-food scandal. The only problem was that Sevan retired last year, so it is unclear what the suspension really means. It does not impact his pension or current $1 salary. News of the suspension gave fresh ideas to organizations worldwide that wished to discipline individuals no longer with their organization. Major League Baseball announced that it has suspended retired steroid user, Jose Canseco. "We take a...

Inquiry on Food-for-Oil Plan Cites U.N. Diplomat for Conflict By JUDITH MILLER and WARREN HOGE n interim report by a commission investigating the United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq said the former head of the program had violated the United Nations Charter by helping a company owned by a friend to obtain valuable contracts to sell Iraqi oil. The conduct of Benon V. Sevan, a Cypriot official who ran the program between 1997 until its demise in 2003, was a "grave and continuing conflict of interest" and had "seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations," the report concludes. The...

ONE of the key questions being asked of Benon Sevan, the head of the UN’s oil-for- food programme, is how he came to be in possession of £85,000 which he claimed was given to him by an elderly aunt. The report questioned this "unexplained wealth", noting that his aunt, Berdjouhi Zeitountsian, was a retired Cyprus government photographer living on a modest pension. Ms Zeitountsian died last June after falling into the lift shaft at her home, but relatives say they find the story convincing. They say that Mr Sevan, who is the illegitimate son of one of Ms Zeitountsian’s sisters,...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Iraq called Friday for a widening of the investigation of the U.N. oil-for-food program and demanded the immediate return of money in the U.N. account that paid for administration of the humanitarian relief effort. Iraq's U.N. Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie also reiterated the government's demand that the United Nations stop using oil-for-food money to pay for the independent investigation into the program led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. "It is outrageous that Iraqi funds were mismanaged and then we have to pay for finding out about the mismanagement," he told a news conference a...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) pledged Friday to get to the bottom of any wrongdoing by the United Nations (news - web sites) in the Iraq (news - web sites) oil-for-food scandal. "We are as determined as everyone to get to the bottom of this. We do not want this shadow to hang over the U.N.," Annan told reporters as he arrived at headquarters. "So we want to get to the bottom of it, get to the truth and take appropriate measures to deal with the gaps," he said. An independent inquiry named by...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Secretary-General Kofi Annan is taking disciplinary action against the head of the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq following an investigation of alleged corruption in the humanitarian program, a senior U.N. official said Thursday. The decision came after a report by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker accused program chief Benon Sevan of unethical conduct and Joseph Stephanides of manipulating an oil-for-food contract, according to Mark Malloch Brown, Annan's chief of staff. At the time the contract was awarded, Stephanides was chief of the U.N. Sanctions Branch and deputy director of the Security Council Affairs Division in...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - An eagerly awaited first report by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker into alleged corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq will be sharply critical of U.N. management in key areas and will target Benon Sevan, who ran the program, a source close to the investigation told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The Volcker report, to be released Thursday afternoon, will focus on the administration, financial transactions, and internal auditing of the $60 billion program, all of which were "tainted badly," said the person with knowledge of the report. The interim report will not...

Did United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan hightail it to Moscow to check in with his handpicked UN reform man Yevgeny Primakov within weeks of William Safire’s New York Times expose on alleged scandal in the Oil-For-Food Program? The first of Safire’s groundbreaking Oil-For-Food investigative stories ran in mid-March, 2004. Here’s Annan’s Moscow itinerary as documented by The Russian Federation: "Annan arrived in Moscow on Sunday, April 4, 2004 where he had an early working dinner with Evgeni (sic) Primakov, former Prime Minister of the Russian Federation." On the following day, Annan visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where...

Did United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan hightail it to Moscow to check in with his handpicked UN reform man Yevgeny Primakov within weeks of William Safire’s New York Times expose on alleged scandal in the Oil-For-Food Program? The first of Safire’s groundbreaking Oil-For-Food investigative stories ran in mid-March, 2004. Here’s Annan’s Moscow itinerary as documented by The Russian Federation: "Annan arrived in Moscow on Sunday, April 4, 2004 where he had an early working dinner with Evgeni (sic) Primakov, former Prime Minister of the Russian Federation." On the following day, Annan visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where...

Perhaps Paul Volcker, head of the United Nations-authorized inquiry into the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, was speaking solely of graft when he said recently that the internal audits of Oil-for-Food contained “no flaming red flags.” But if he meant anything beyond outright criminality, he was surely wrong. On that score, previously secret U.N. internal audits of the multi-billion dollar program, finally released last week by Volcker’s own investigating commission, are packed with bombshells enough to shatter any normal business – let alone a U.N. program supplied with $1.4 billion to cover its administrative costs in monitoring $111 billion worth of deals...

Last week certainly was instructive about the epic... United Nations Oil for Food program. First came Monday's hearings in Norm Coleman's Senate Subcommittee on Investigations where we learned that Saddam Hussein gamed the program for twice as much unmonitored revenue as previously thought -- $21.3 billion, up from $10 billion. Also fascinating was chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer's testimony that he believes, based on what high-level Iraqi sources have told him, that U.N. Oil for Food director Benon Sevan did in fact profit from Iraqi oil vouchers. Mr. Sevan continues to deny the allegation. Then on Wednesday Henry Hyde's House...

Head of U.N. Program in Iraq Accused of Improperly Accepting Purchasing Rights. UNITED NATIONS -- Benon Sevan, the official accused of improperly receiving lucrative rights to purchase oil from Saddam Hussein's government while he was running the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, discouraged his staff from probing allegations of corruption and helped block efforts by the U.N. anti-corruption unit to assess where the program was vulnerable to abuse, according to senior U.N. officials. Sevan said that such an assessment would prove too costly and that U.N. member governments bore primary responsibility for policing the program, according to senior U.N. officials...

Introduction The Iraqi daily Al-Mada ("Horizon") was the first newspaper to publish a list of 270 individuals and organizations that benefited from oil vouchers granted to them by the regime of Saddam Hussein.(1) The intention of the grant was either to allow the recipients to sell the vouchers to intermediaries for a quick profit or to buy the oil themselves at discounted prices. It was assumed that the vouchers would permit their ultimate bearer to purchase Iraqi oil at a sufficiently discounted price as to leave a margin of profit to the voucher beneficiary, the intermediary, the oil company which...