Demand for Annan to resign over Oil-for-Food failures

[RonOnGuitar]

The KofiGate-UNScam keeps gaining steam. The cool thing here - for me - is that Coleman is one of my state's two US Senators. Coleman's also taking on the RIIA for it's ridiculous overreaction and suing of people who download music.

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Demand for Annan to resign over Oil-for-Food failures



Times Online UK



A UNITED STATES senator leading an ongoing congressional investigation into the Iraqi Oil-for-Food scandal called for Kofi Annan to resign as United Nations Secretary-General yesterday.



Norm Coleman, a Republican from Minnesota who chairs the Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations, said that Saddam Hussein had reaped about $21.3 billion (£11 billion) through abuses of the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme because of Mr Annan’s lack of oversight.



“The decision to call for Mr Annan’s resignation does not come easily, but I have arrived at this conclusion because the most extensive fraud in the history of the UN occurred on his watch,” Mr Coleman wrote in The Wall Street Journal. “As long as Mr Annan remains in charge, the world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks and under-the-table payments that took place under the UN’s collective nose.”



The UN rejected the call for Mr Annan, who is more than halfway through his second five-year term, to step down. “He is intent on continuing his substantive work,” Fred Eckhard, the chief UN spokesman, said. But the resignation call and moves to cut US funding for the UN threatened to overshadow the release today of a sweeping reform proposal for the institution.



The UN’s top brass feel besieged by an onslaught of criticism, particularly since President Bush’s re-election, ranging from questions about sexual misconduct by UN staff in the Democratic Republic of Congo to staff complaints about a lack of accountability among their bosses. Parallel UN, congressional and criminal investigations of alleged corruption in the Oil-for-Food programme are pending.



The senator’s call comes at a bad time for Mr Annan, whose son was revealed this week to have taken money from a UN contractor involved in the Oil-For-Food programme for years longer than he had admitted.



UN officials have confirmed that Kojo Annan, a Nigerian businessman, had continued to receive $2,500 a month from the Swiss firm Cotecna until as recently as February, even though he said that he had severed his tie to the company when it was awarded a UN contract in Iraq in 1998.



A Cotecna spokesman said that Kojo Annan was employed in West Africa and had no involvement in Iraq. Kojo Annan maintains that all the reported payments to him from Cotecna were entirely proper and had nothing to do with the Oil-for-Food programme.