WASHINGTON, 16 June 2005 — US Congressional investigators examining the UN’s corruption-riddled oil-for-food program in Iraq have reopened their files on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan after the discovery of two e-mails suggesting Annan’s relationship with a Swiss company that employed his son Kojo was much closer than he previously declared.
The oil-for-food program was established in 1996 to help ordinary Iraqis suffering under UN sanctions imposed after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Michael Wilson, then a vice-president of Cotecna and a friend of Kofi and Kojo Annan, wrote the e-mails in 1998. Cotecna, a Geneva-based inspection company, employed Kojo as a staff member, and then as a consultant until December 1998 and continued payments to him till 2004. The memo, provided to the investigators by Cotecna on Monday, seems to contradict Annan’s insistence that he was unaware that his son’s employer was bidding for the contract.
New York Times revealed the memo on Tuesday. One of the e-mails indicates the secretary-general met Cotecna officials in Paris in December 1998; just weeks before the company was awarded its first UN contract to monitor humanitarian aid arriving in Iraq.
The second involves Wilson expressing confidence to a colleague that Cotecna would get the contract because of “effective but quiet lobbying” in New York diplomatic circles. Wilson wrote that Annan “and his entourage” told him a few weeks before the contract was awarded that “we could count on their support.”
In another memo written a few days after the Cotecna team met with UN officials in New York in early December, Wilson wrote, “We can expect a positive outcome to our efforts.” A week later on Dec. 11, the inspection company won the $10 million-a-year contract to inspect Iraqi imports. The suggestion that Annan and Cotecna officials had discussed the company’s bid for the Iraq contract directly contradicts the findings of an interim report from the inquiry in late March when a panel led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker looked into abuses of the $64 billion sanctions relief program for Iraq.
This report found no evidence that Annan tried to influence the awarding of the contract and not enough evidence to dispute the secretary-general’s insistence that he did not even know Cotecna was a bidder.
Reid Morden, executive director of the Independent Inquiry Committee, the IIC, told AP: “Does this raise a question? Sure.” The IIC is expected to publish its final report within a few months about the program, which ran from 1996 to 2003.
Cotecna’s spokesman refused to comment on whether the meeting took place but said the company had recently discovered the memo in a forensic audit and passed it on to investigators.
It now appears Annan knew much more than he had disclosed, which could lead to more calls for his resignation, especially from his outspoken critics in the US Congress. It also raises more questions about whether Annan will be able to focus his attention on vital UN reform issues ahead of a September summit of world leaders — and whether world leaders will continue to respect for him as secretary-general of the UN.
