Eager to put scandals behind them, and arguing that they now need to turn a new page and work to reform the United Nations, Kofi Annan and his top aides last week pronounced the secretary-general “exonerated” by the second interim Volcker report.

As shown by our scandal sheet on page 6, however, very few of the weaknesses detailed in the Volcker report were in fact resolved – or even addressed. The report’s conclusions were at times at odds with the details of its findings, which portrayed one big cozy U.N. family, complete with sons, fathers, “uncles,” and “aunties.”

The man who recruited the secretary-general’s son, Kojo Annan, to Cotecna, a Swiss company that later won a $66 million oil-for-food contract, was Michael Wilson, a childhood friend of Kojo who knew the elder Mr. Annan as “uncle.”

Earlier, Kojo was allowed to explore business opportunities in visits to the U.N. procurement office, where one employee, Diana Mills-Aryee – who raised Kojo after his parents’ divorce and whom he knew as “auntie” – told colleagues that Kojo is “good with computers,” allowing him access to procurement’s most sensitive data.

Over the weekend, a former business partner of Kojo Annan, Pierre Mouselli, complained to the London Sunday Times that much of the evidence he had supplied to the Volcker Committee – which showed that the secretary general knew about his son’s plans to do business in Iraq – was ignored. In turn, Mr. Mouselli’s credibility was impugned by the Volcker Committee, with anonymous quotes by the likes of a former ambassador of Saddam Hussein to Nigeria, who called Mr. Mouselli “unstable.”

But even if, as the report concluded, Mr. Annan knew nothing of Cotecna’s U.N. procurement, or his son’s plans to do business with the United Nations in Iraq, the secretary-general’s management skills were questioned last week.

Scandals continue to beseech the organization he leads, and they involve some of those closest to Mr. Annan, including his former chief of staff, the man who Mr. Annan has nominated to oversee the oil-for-food program, Benon Sevan, and many others in every corner of the organization.

Much of this, according to the United Nations’ fiercest defenders, is the result of the Iraq war. Once Mr. Annan pronounced the war “illegal,” goes the argument, American politicians and other right-wingers discovered that the United Nations is less than perfect. How to explain, then, the admiration that many of those same politicians feel toward Pope John Paul II, who also objected publicly to the war?

Mr. Volcker and his dedicated investigators notwithstanding, exposing the recent U.N. weaknesses began with the press. Early on, the United Nations pooh-poohed revelations that appeared in small newspapers like al-Mada in liberated Iraq. It first listed names of politicians, journalists, and U.N. officials in position to aid the Saddam Hussein regime, who received oil allocations as bribery under the oil-for-food program.

Now, U.N. press briefings have be come a daily onslaught by journalists eager to poke holes in last week’s ludicrous pronouncements of innocence, and even more eager to scoop one another in exposing new scandals.

But the United Nations still refuses to address its shortcomings – at least not before they appear in print. Only once The New York Sun revealed that the organization agreed to reimburse legal fees for the man at the center of the oil-for-food scandal, Benon Sevan, did Mr. Annan muster the courage to reverse that embarrassing decision. (Will Mr. Sevan now decide to retaliate by telling other stories that could further embarrass the United Nations?)

As our scandal sheet shows, oil for food was but a symptom of a large-scale, systematic failure. It was only a year or so ago when Mr. Annan used to argue at every opportunity that the United Nation’s moral authority and credibility around the world are so great that more international tasks should be directed its way. Much of that authority, if it ever really existed, has since dissipated.

Like many Nobel laureates before him (Arafat, anyone?), Mr. Annan has been on a downhill path ever since he was bestowed with the Swedish Academy honor. Stripped of many loyal friends who have been thrown overboard as result of scandals, and having had to publicly denounce his own son, Mr. Annan increasingly looks like a lonely Nixon once Watergate got the better of him, and less and less like the man who would turn the United Nations around.