Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the Inner City to Wall Street to the United Nations

As UN Ban Takes Photos With Businessmen, Unclear Who They Are

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, December 19 -- UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is usually insulated, including from the Press, by bodyguards paid by the UN's member states. But sometimes photo opportunities with Ban are allowed, or sold.

   Such appeared to be the case on December 14, when Ban was whisked to a stakeout with a series of Asian businessmen. Video here and below.

  Inner City Press filmed what it could of the photo op -- those arranging it kept telling the Press it had to leave -- and afterward several in Ban's circle said they had no idea who the businessmen had been.

  There was dark talk about one David Ng, a businessman who has bankrolled "vanity" media projects given awards that night -- people funded by Ng used the word "vanity," so we use it here. They speak of similar awarded given in September 2011 to the maligned President of Equatorial Guinea, in a nearly endless process of "blue washing" at the UN.

  In one view, Ban Ki-moon is the high priest of blue washing, who can for example name the chairman of bailed out Bank of America as the chairman of this "high level" group on sustainable energy for all, even as BofA is protested as the #1 funder of mountain top removal coal mining.

  But in a sense Ban himself is washed in blue: liberals who don't follow issues closely automatically assume Ban is doing the right thing, despite repeated and conclusive evidence to the contrary. The Emperor has no clothes, but who dares say it? For now, we run this video of Ban and the businessmen, for as a form of crowd-sourcing, who are identify them? Watch this site.