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

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive

UNITED NATIONS, October 7, updated Oct 8 -- A member of the UN's Somalia Eritrea Monitoring Group has reportedly used UN SEMG time and supplies for unrelated advocacy regarding Eritrea, Inner City Press learned and then obtained documentation of, exclusively put online here.

Update: on October 8, Inner City Press asked the UN’s Spokesman about the letter. The Spokesman said it has now been “shown” to Dinesh Mahtani, who has resigned. Video here.

 Sources told Inner City Press that Dinesh Mahtani, the finance expert on SEMG and previously on the DR Congo Sanctions group, was found requesting favors from a member state, to which the SEMG reports. Here is a document:

a letter from Dinesh Mahtani, ostensibly in his SEMG role, saying that former Eritrean official Ali Abdu "has great potential to play a stabilizing role in Eritrea with the country possibly headed to an uncertain period in its history."

This is hardly the first controversy in the SEMG -- but usually the members wait until they are off or on their way off the Monitor Group to “let it all hang out,” as one source put it of previous SEMG chair Matt Bryden.

  The current chair, Jarat Chopra, has faced complaints from Somalia, also exclusively reported by Inner City Press.