Punishing the Not Guilty
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The only punishment handed down by Secretary-General Annan against any underling involved in the oil-for-food scandal to date was against a lifelong employee named Joseph Stephanides, who was fired after his name popped up in a report by the committee headed by Paul Volcker. That’s funny. Out of the rogues’ gallery under him, the only one Mr. Annan managed to discipline was a man who is not guilty.
Mr. Stephanides, accused by no one of personal corruption, was said by the Volcker committee to have “tainted” the “regular competitive bidding process” when a British inspection company, Lloyd’s Register, was picked in 1996 to enforce sanctions in Iraq. The Cypriot national was at the time the liaison between Mr. Annan’s office and the Security Council.
Without hearing Mr. Stephanides’s explanation, Mr. Annan’s chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, decided back in May to make an example of him. Under Mr. Malloch Brown’s regime, no one would ever again be allowed to break staff rules, a senior official told reporters at the time, displaying an unprecedented determination, but first securing a non-attribution arrangement.
At that time, remember, former oil-for-food chief Benon Sevan was allowed to remain on staff as an adviser to Mr. Annan. The United Nations also offered to reimburse the legal fees Mr. Sevan incurred as he tried to fend off the now-substantiated accusations that he received an Iraqi bribe. Under the various immunities offered to U.N. staffers, Mr. Sevan was eventually able to skip town and go home to Cyprus, where he remains protected from any possible American prosecution.
Mr. Stephanides, meanwhile, remained here, attempting to clear his name. Late last week, after hearing all sides in the case, a three-member U.N. disciplinary committee handed a sealed recommendation to Mr. Annan. I have no idea what the panel decided, but any fair-minded observer should have recommended dropping all measures against Mr. Stephanides.
Everything he did was cleared by higher-ups, Mr. Stephanides says. It makes sense because there was no reason for anyone in Mr. Annan’s office to defy the Security Council, and the consensus on the council in 1996 was that Lloyd’s, the British company, was the only logical choice for the inspection job. Its only serious competitor was a French company, Bureau Veritas, but the council decided to award the contract for handling the program’s finances to a French institution, the Bank Nationale de Paris.
Once BNP was selected, “my government, supported by several other members of the Security Council, believed that a French company should not also be selected for the inspection contract,” the American deputy U.N. ambassador at the time, Edward Ghneim, wrote to the panel hearing the case. The accusations against Mr. Stephanides are “based on a misunderstanding of the political process leading up to the selection,” he added.
Britain’s U.N. ambassador at the time, John Weston, defended Mr. Stephanides on similar grounds, and then-first secretary of the British mission, Carne Ross, wrote the U.N. panel that he was “surprised” by allegations against Mr. Stephanides. “Nothing in my experience and observations would lead me to believe that the treatment he has received, including his dismissal, was in any way justified in this case,” Mr. Ross wrote. Similar statements were conveyed by other council members and by the then-head of the sanction committee, Tono Eitel.
The U.N. staff union passed a resolution that “notes with deep concern” the “singling out” of Mr. Stephanides. His dismissal, according to the resolution, “appears to have been unduly influenced by political considerations, while other United Nations officials mentioned in the same [Volcker] report in connection with wrongdoing did not receive such treatment.”
Mr. Volcker bent over backward to afford Mr. Annan the benefit of the doubt in influencing the procurement of a company that employed his son, Kojo. Mr. Annan’s deputy, Louise Frechette; former chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, and internal investigator Dileep Nair, to name just a few, also got off with a slap on the wrist. Mr. Stephanides was accused of much less than either of those but was punished like the biggest criminal. Now that a panel has heard his case and handed its recommendations, let’s see if Mr. Annan will do the right thing.
