It's official - Sevan is a crook...

How anybody can have faith in the UN is beyond me.

THE United Nations’ own inquiry into the Oil-for-Food scandal concluded yesterday that the head of its largest humanitarian programme took nearly $150,000 (£84,000) in kickbacks, most of it in stacks of $100 bills.

Benon Sevan was accused of receiving the cash for steering Iraqi oil contracts to a firm run by a brother-in-law and a cousin of Boutros Boutros Ghali, the former UN chief.

The charge of outright corruption came in the report by the UN inquiry led by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. The findings rocked the UN, where officials initially dismissed the Oil-for-Food scandal as a vendetta by right-wing American politicians angered by UN opposition to the war in Iraq.

Mr Volcker’s findings suggest that Saddam Hussein’s government was successful in effectively bribing the head of the Oil-for-Food programme for the entire six years of its existence. The Volcker commission said that Mr Sevan, who had been struggling after losing on the stock market, received $147,184 in cash from December 1998 to January 2002.