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They thronged to the sites five unattended restaurants and stole everything that wasnt nailed down. As one witness marvelled after seeing an envoy make off with a baked turkey under one arm and a framed picture under the other, They were locusts! The next day, however, the incident hadnt happened - not officially, anyway. A UN spokesmen swore blind that a senior official, concerned that his colleagues might go hungry, had granted permission for staffers to help themselves. There had been no mass theft, in other words, because after the event, everything was declared free for the taking. With a few simple words, official honesty was once again the order of business inside the glass-fronted monolith overlooking the East River. If all episodes of pillage were as easy to explain, the UN might not today be facing what is shaping up as the biggest scandal in its chequered history. This time it isnt cutlery, baked hams and wine-cellar locks that have gone missing, but at least US$11 billion $17 billion, depending on who is doing the counting - or rather, the guessing, since the UN has been curiously disinclined to investigate where all that money went. Whatever the sum involved, it vanished from the UN-administered Iraq Oil For Food programme, and unlike last years petty looting, those at the centre of suspicion arent lowly bureaucrats but a tight cluster of high-up insiders centred on the office, family and inner circle of Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself. To understand what happened - or better, what might have happened, because the UN isnt releasing documents and balance sheets - you have to go back to 1996, when the international body set up a system whereby Iraqi oil could reach the market only if the proceeds went to the humanitarian relief of the Iraqi people. For one thing, the former employer of Kofi Annans son, Kojo, who was on the payroll until shortly before the contracts were awarded, when he became a contract consultant. Cotecnas job involved squaring the income from oil sales against the goods that were allegedly purchased. If Saddams Iraq wanted to import ambulances from Saudi Arabia, the contract of sale had to be approved and the incoming goods inspected by Cotecna, as did tens of thousands of other items, from Russian hoes to Belarus welding rods. In the first year alone, Cotecna pocketed $6 million $93 million for its services. After that, because the UN isnt saying, its share of the bounty is anybodys guess. When Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal began looking into the Oil For Food programme, she soon came up with one explanation: Many of the suppliers, like the Jordanian manufacturer of school desks listed on contract records, simply did not exist. As Rosett has noted, Cotecna was responsible for approving tens of billions worth of supplies inbound to a regime much interested in smuggling, and evidently accustomed to dealing in bribes and kickbacks. The issue, she explained in one of her painstakingly detailed investigations, was never whether the monitors were cheap, but whether they were trustworthy. Evidence of probity, however, is as hard to find as those notional school desks from Amman - or the ultimate destination of the money spent on them. The suspicion is that those deals, perhaps the overwhelming majority, were nothing but scams and shams. Remember how opponents of the Iraq War kept citing the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children perishing for want of medicines? Well, Oil For Food was supposed to guarantee that those supplies arrived, but apparently few did. Again, the UNs stonewalling makes it hard to determine exactly how much was fleeced, but there are some tantalising hints. Before Oil For Food was handed over to Iraq, the UN conducted an urgent, last-minute review of thousands of contracts. Rosett calls it a house cleaning, but whatever description is used, some 1500 supplier contracts - one in four - were immediately suspended or banned outright from further participation. Into Saddams pocket is a good guess, with lesser amounts creamed off by the operators of front companies, smugglers and, perhaps, even UN officials.
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