By Claudia Rosett, Rosett Report
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Let no one fault the UN for lack of enterprise and ingenuity. A series of federal investigations over the past few years have been delving into the activities of a growing list of UN officials engaged in all sorts of lively and creative endeavors, from setting up secret offshore front companies, to laundering money meant to buy UN peacekeeping supplies, to allegedly keeping counterfeit U.S. $100 bills in a UN Development Program (UNDP) office safe in North Korea.
Today brings the arrest of a UN employee, Vyacheslav Manokhin, alleged by the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan to have taken part in a scheme using the UN letterhead to help "numerous non-United States citizens" enter the U.S. on fraudulent grounds. The federal complaint names two other defendants (all must be presumed innocent) and describes a scheme that involves, among other things, the office of the UNDP in Uzbekistan. That's the same UNDP, flagship agency of the UN, also embroiled in the Cash-for-Kim scandal, involving alleged payments of cash to the government of North Korea.
No country contributes more to the UN than the U.S., which provides 22% of the core budget, 25% of the peacekeeping budget (soon likely to be 27%), and hosts the UN's lavish tax-exempt spread in New York (where the UN now plans to spend $1.9 billion renovating its premises, with U.S. taxpayers expected to foot the lion's share of the bill). With most of the UN's 192 member states either indifferent to UN corruption, or actively complicit, and UN top management more adept at covering up than cleaning up, the only serious check on UN corruption at this point appears to be the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York. And despite the valiant efforts of the feds, it is beyond their powers, as well as beyond U.S. jurisdiction, to police the entire global sprawl of the UN's more than $20 billion system of endless murky agencies, departments, offices, conferences and diplomatically immune, unaccountable cross-border movements of people and material. Meanwhile, we can now start wondering who, exactly, has been entering the U.S. on fraudulent grounds, and why -- courtesy of the UN.
Do we have a problem here?
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