Investigator asks Annan to resign over son's Iraqi deal
FOR there to be a thorough probe of alleged corruption in the Iraqi oil-for-food programme, United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, must quit office.
This was canvassed yesterday by the United States' Senator who is leading the investigation, Norm Coleman.
The "massive scope of this debacle demands nothing less," Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota, wrote in an opinion piece published yesterday in The Wall Street Journal.
"The decision to call for Mr. Annan's resignation does not come easily," Coleman declared, adding: "But I have arrived at this conclusion because the most extensive fraud in the history of the UN occurred on his watch."
He continued: "The world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks and under-the-table payments that occurred under the UN's collective nose while Annan is in charge."
Coleman is chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has been investigating the oil-for-food programme for seven months.
Coleman said he was not accusing Annan of anything "other than incompetence and mismanagement."
The programme, administered by the UN, was designed to allow Iraq, when it was under economic sanctions after the Persian Gulf War, to sell oil and use the proceeds to buy food and medicine to mitigate the sanctions' impact on the Iraqi people.
Coleman said the investigation could not be completed with Annan at the helm of the world body.
"The bottom line is, one man was in charge and if we're going to get to the bottom of this, he's got to step back so that we can have trust and credibility and transparency in sorting out what happened," he said yesterday in an interview on the CNN's American Morning.
Coleman's committee has charged that Saddam Hussein was able to siphon off $6.7 billion in oil revenues from the programme and made an additional $13.7 billion smuggling oil in contravention of international sanctions.
Annan has appointed former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker, to conduct an internal investigation into the allegations. But Coleman, while calling Volcker a "good and honest man," said that the United Nations "simply cannot root out its own corruption while Mr. Annan is in charge."
"If we're to get to the bottom of this, if there's to be any credibility, the person that was at the helm during the course of this thing cannot be the guy that Volcker reports to, cannot be the guy that we go asking for help and assistance in getting the people we need to talk to," Coleman told CNN.
The Senator added: "He (Annan) needs to step back, step down for the credibility of the organisation itself."
Annan's son, Kojo, received money for consulting work done in Africa for the Swiss firm, Cotecna, which inspected goods entering Iraq under the oil-for-food programme.
On Monday, the secretary-general said he was disappointed to learn in news reports that his son remained on the Cotecna payroll until this year, despite earlier UN statements that he had stopped receiving money from the firm back in 1998.
No formal charges of wrongdoing have been made against Kojo Annan by any of at least six separate investigations under way into the oil-for-food programme. But the world body's scribe conceded on Monday that the latest news creates the perception "of conflict of interests and wrongdoing" at the UN.
Kofi Annan also said he had no personal involvement in the granting of contracts to companies that participated in the oil-for-food programme.
