EclectEcon

Economics and the mid-life crisis have much in common: Both dwell on foregone opportunities

C'est la vie; c'est la guerre; c'est la pomme de terre . . . . . . . . . . . . . email: jpalmer at uwo dot ca


. . . . . . . . . . .Richard Posner should be awarded the next Nobel Prize in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Serious Conflict of Interst

More on the oil-for-food scandal in the U.N.:
On February 3, the United Nations-authorized inquiry into the Oil-for-Food
scandal, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, issued its first
interim report. Volcker's most lurid finding so far is that Saddam Hussein, at
the behest of Oil-for-Food Programme Executive Director Benon Sevan, allocated
lucrative oil sales to a Panama-based company. This, concluded Volcker,
constituted "a grave and continuing conflict of interest" on Sevan's part and a
violation of the U.N. charter. Investigators are now pondering Volcker's
disclosure that Sevan's aunt, while living on a government pension in Cyprus,
sent Sevan a series of payments from 1999 through 2003 totaling $160,000. The
aunt then died in 2004 after falling down an elevator shaft, right around the
time the United Nations, after much stonewalling by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan and assorted protests of innocence from Sevan, agreed to launch an
official probe into Oil-for-Food....

The rest of the article is by pay subscription [thanks to BenS for the tip]. How long will it take for the rest of the world to see what happened and depose Kofi Annan?
 
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