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Tsunami reconstruction funds worth $US500 million are being lost to fraud and corruption because of the failure by the United Nations to implement its own anti-fraud measures. This claim is made by the UN’s former deputy director of investigations, Frank Montil, a former ASIO officer who for a decade was the deputy director of the UN’s internal watchdog unit, set up to investigate fraud and corruption within the UN and its agencies.

NEW YORK - A United Nations employee was arrested Monday on charges that he and two others used U.N. stationery in a visa fraud scheme, prosecutors said. Vyacheslav Manokhin, a U.N. employee based in Manhattan, was accused of helping numerous non-U.S. citizens enter the country illegally by providing fraudulent documents so they could obtain visas to attend conferences that either did not exist or which they did not attend. The charges in the scheme, which prosecutors said began in April 2005 and was continuing, were outlined in a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Manokhin, 45, was...

An employee at the United Nations headquarters in New York has been arrested on suspicion of visa fraud. Russian national Vyacheslav Manokhin, 45, is accused of using his position to provide false documents to support US visa applications since April 2005.

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VIENNA, Austria — U.N. standards for selecting peacekeepers are too low, and soldiers from countries whose armies are suspected of abuse should not be considered for peacekeeping duty, the U.N.'s chief anti-torture investigator said. U.N. special rapporteur Manfred Nowak also told the Austrian news magazine Profil in an interview for Monday's editions that the United Nations should reconsider forming its own professional standing army. Concerns about the quality, training and ethics of peacekeepers are growing as developing nations with questionable human-rights records increasingly send troops for international peacekeeping operations, Nowak said.

UN confirms inquiry of sexual abuse cases in Ivory Coast 23/07/2007 18:05 ABIDJAN, July 23 (AFP) The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Ivory Coast confirmed it was investigating cases of sexual abuse of Ivorian women, including young girls, by some Moroccan soldiers. "There was an internal investigation which proved the facts, but we are waiting the results of the full investigation led by our internal affairs services, which will confirm the facts," UN spokeswoman Margarita Amodeo told AFP. "There are minors among the victims concerned," she said. The United Nations at the weekend suspended a Moroccan peacekeeping unit based in...

The United Nations says it is rushing an audit team to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to probe recent allegations of gold trafficking by some of its peacekeepers there. Indian UN "blue helmets" have been accused of trafficking in gold with rebels of the chiefly Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in eastern DRC, according to UN documents and witnesses. And Pakistani UN troops based in the north-eastern Ituri area in 2005 have been embroiled in similar allegations of trading in gold and guns with Congolese militia they were meant to be disarming. UN under-secretary general...

By Evelyn Leopold UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Republicans in the U.S. Congress are accusing the U.N. Development Program of firing a whistle-blower connected with the agency's North Korea program, a target of the Bush administration. Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who last week sent a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said Artjon Shkurtaj, chief of operations in North Korea in 2005 to 2006, was dismissed for criticizing the UNDP. On Thursday, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida also sent a letter to Ban, urging him to intervene to protect Shkurtaj, who she said had uncovered "significant irregularities." The Bush administration...

NEW YORK (AP) — A former United Nations official was convicted Thursday of charges that he helped a friend secure $100 million in U.N. contracts in exchange for a huge discount on two luxury Manhattan apartments and cash. Sanjaya Bahel, 57, chief of the U.N.’s Commodity Procurement Section from 1999 to 2003, had maintained his innocence since his November arrest.

NEW YORK - Discounted apartments and cash were given to a former United Nations procurement official and two other U.N. workers got nights with prostitutes to help secure $100 million in U.N. contracts, a businessman testified Tuesday at a bribery trial. The witness, Nishan Kohli, provided many of the details at the heart of the government's case against Sanjaya Bahel, who was chief of the U.N.'s Commodity Procurement Section from 1999 to 2003. Bahel, 57, is charged with bribery, wire fraud and mail fraud. Kohli testified in U.S. District Court in Manhattan that Bahel was so helpful to the Kohli...

An unpublished United Nations report says the government of Sudan is flying weapons and heavy military equipment into Darfur in violation of Security Council resolutions and painting Sudanese military planes white to disguise them as UN or African Union aircraft. In one case, which the report illustrates with close-up pictures, the letters "UN" have been stenciled onto the wing of a white-washed Sudanese armed forces plane that is parked on a military apron at a Darfur airport. Bombs guarded by uniformed soldiers are laid out in rows by its side. The report says that, contrary to government denials, the freshly...

Paul Wolfowitz's conduct at the World Bank is outrageous and he deserves to be fired—although, let's face it, any woman who would sleep with him does deserve a raise—but let's not be romantic about his Bank opponents. To hear it from them, once Wolfie is out the door, the Bank will get back to its core mission. If by core mission they mean rewarding corrupt, Third World elites and making the poor poorer, I think they'd be correct. There are few organizations that have done more harm to the people of the planet than the World Bank. During the 1960s...

The United Nations Development Programme office in Pyongyang, North Korea, sits in a Soviet-style compound. Like clockwork, a North Korean official wearing a standard-issue dark windbreaker and slacks would come to the door each business day. He would take a manila envelope stuffed with cash--a healthy portion of the UN's disbursements for aid projects in the country--and leave without ever providing receipts. According to sources at the UN, this went on for years, resulting in the transfer of up to $150 million in hard foreign currency to the Kim Jong Il government at a time when the United States was...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's Foreign Ministry poured scorn on a U.S. court's conviction of one of its U.N. diplomats for money laundering, saying on Thursday it had grave doubts about the trial. Vladimir Kuznetsov, 49, who once chaired a U.N. budget committee, was found guilty on Wednesday of helping launder more than $300,000 in bribes and taking a share of the money. He faces up to 20 years in prison. Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said in a statement that Russia had been amazed by his arrest, which it considered unnecessary for the investigation. "During the process and trial, the...

Fresh allegations of corruption within the United Nations have surfaced in a confidential audit report that claims the 2003 election of the current chief of the U.N. weather agency was manipulated. The report, obtained by The Associated Press on Friday, centered around payments to government delegates at the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization, which coordinates the study of the world's weather and climate. WMO instructed Maria Veiga of Portugal, an independent auditor who wrote the report, to investigate the financial irregularities in 2003. Three years later, she was fired for what the agency described as "serious misconduct." The auditor, however, said...

The first clue that the U.N. Development Program in Pyongyang needs to be looked at came from someone in the American intelligence community, which is more interested in this dangerous weapons-proliferating corner of the "axis of evil" than in other far-flung countries where the United Nations's "good offices" operate, a source has told me. On Friday, UNDP officials reacted with their typical defense: shooting in all directions. As a former American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, told me yesterday, "They always blame an American first." American-controlled agencies do it, too, UNDP officials said. Their board of directors, which...

Excerpt - UNITED NATIONS (AP)--The U.S. accused the U.N. development agency of funneling millions of dollars in hard currency to North Korea with little assurance that leader Kim Jong Il used the money to help his people instead of diverting it to other activities including nuclear weapons, according to U.S. officials and letters obtained Friday. U.S. deputy ambassador Mark Wallace charged that the agency's program in North Korea operated "in blatant violation of U.N. rules" for years. He demanded an immediate external audit of the program going back to at least 1998 that would focus on U.S. concerns that Pyongyang...

"UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 19 — Ban Ki-moon, the new secretary general, called today for outside examination of all United Nations activities after a published report that the United Nations Development Program in North Korea was making unaccountable payments in hard currency to local staff members and the Pyongyang government. Mr. Ban’s sweeping order sought “an urgent, system-wide and external inquiry into all activities done around the globe by the U.N. funds and programs.”

The former United Nations oil-for-food chief was charged Tuesday with bribery and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his role in the scandal-tainted humanitarian program. The charges against Benon Sevan, 69, of Nicosia, Cyprus, were contained in a rewrite of an indictment stemming from the scandal over the operation set up from 1996 to 2003 to permit the Iraqi government to sell oil primarily to buy food and medicine for suffering Iraqis. The program was designed to help Iraqis cope with U.N. sanctions, but authorities said it was corrupted by bureaucrats, oil tycoons and Saddam Hussein after the former Iraqi...

Members of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in southern Sudan are facing allegations of raping and abusing children as young as 12, The Daily Telegraph has learned. The abuse allegedly began two years ago when the UN mission in southern Sudan (UNMIS) moved in to help rebuild the region after a 23-year civil war. advertisement The UN has up to 10,000 military personnel in the region, of all nationalities and the allegations involve peacekeepers, military police and civilian staff. The first indications of sexual exploitation emerged within months of the UN force's arrival and The Daily Telegraph has seen a...