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By Matthew Russell Lee & sources, Exclusive

UN GATE, Nov 25 – UNESCO, like the whole UN system under Antonio Guterres is falling apart in corruption and fraud.

  Inner City Press has been reporting on serious malfeasance by the French Audrey Azoulay administration at UNESCO in Paris, almost as bad as Antonio Guterres' corruption in and of the UN in New York. A fish rots from the head.

UNESCO, like the whole UN system under Antonio Guterres is falling apart in corruption and fraud. In recent years, Inner City Press has revealed on a regular basis the alarming situation of the Paris-based UN agency, headed by Frenchwoman Audrey Azoulay since 2017. 

This week, at the emergency meeting convened with China's ambassador to UNESCO, YANG Jin, DG Azoulay pompously announced that the organization has finally gone bankrupt as of December 1, 2022, and that without the immediate payment of China's regular contribution to UNESCO, she will have to borrow money from private banks in order to maintain its operations.  For those ambassadors to UNESCO waiting for a scoop, here is a real scoop. UNESCO's financial failure and huge deficit is the agency's best kept secret these days. But not anymore.

Let's see how member states react to the revelation of this unpleasant truth.  The other sensational argument of the French is that if the financial crisis worsens, there will be no choice but to sell the UNESCO/Bonvin building to the French authorities. Since the building is located in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, the anticipated estimate of the price Azoulay can get for it would be very high.

  Indeed, China usually pays its contribution between April and July of each year. But not this time. Besides political reasons, there are more prosaic reasons led by personal interests.

The influential Chinese lobbyist DU Yue, appointed by DG Azoulay to UNESCO in 2018, sees his current "senior consultant contract" ending on December 21, 2022, with no prospect of renewal, since his "godfather" Firmin Matoko, ADG/PAX (UNESCO's external affairs department) is about to leave the organization also next February. 

Thus, using his connections in Beijing, DU Yue blocks the payment to be processed by Beijing.

It is worth recalling that DU Yue was also a candidate for the UNESCO DDG position which was awarded to another Chinese official.  In 2018, again is close scheming with Firmin Matoko, DU Yue convinced DG Azoulay to sign a Memorandum of Cooperation between UNESCO and the Chinese Railway Estate Company for 5 million dollars to be paid to UNESCO for its programs.

 Not a single dollar reached UNESCO's coffers but DU Yue still received his commission from the company for the free publicity he gave it all over the world for nothing but empty donor promises. As a result, instead of firing him immediately, Azoulay kept DU Yue in the organization.

 The legitimate question is why and how much of the money that DU is usually sharing only with Matoko is also going into other pockets of Azoulay's team?  A second example of serious financial misconduct by DU Yue and Firmin Matoko is the scandal of China's annual financial contribution to the World Heritage Committee (WHC).

Since 2016, China has been contributing half a million dollars to the WHC every year, but since last year, $200,000 has been taken out of that contribution and directed to PAX. Guess who is managing this diverted $200,000? DU Yue and Firmin Matoko.

Again and again, DG Azoulay allows this illegal action to occur. The ADG for Culture, the one his colleagues at UNESCO call the "“baby-Pinochet", the Chilean Ernesto Ottone, is not saying a word about this open theft affecting his sector and programs either.

 Not only does such behavior damage China's reputation, but it also exposes all the corrupt schemes that have been set up internally under DG Audrey Azoulay. As a strong advocate for French and EU interests at UNESCO, Azoulay has combined a confident neglect of the interests of UNESCO's largest contributors and supporters with a total mismanagement of financial, personnel and program operations.

 It is clear that the current situation has nothing to do with a real financial crisis. It is an artificial crisis resulting from the corrupted mismanagement of financial resources by the Azoulay administration. In the past, UNESCO was facing a real financial crisis that erupted in November 2011 after the majority of the organization's member states voted in favor of Palestine's membership.

The United States responded by cutting funding, in a show of solidarity with Israel, by more than 60 million euros per year, or 22 percent of its annual budget. The loss of U.S. funding forced UNESCO to cut expenses, freeze hiring, and eliminate positions and programs. The organization had started at that time the year with a deficit of $150 million out of $653 million for its budget over 2012 and 2013.

 It was a real crisis and yet the option of selling the UNESCO/Bonvin building to the French was not on the table.  UNESCO’s current crisis is best understood in structural terms – a textbook case of how built-in organizational contradictions over the last five years since the 2017 election of Azoulay can escalate and degenerate in a crisis that threatens the organization’s survival.

Despite the desperate need for rigorous management, budgeting procedures have remained highly routinized in ignoring the rules. In essence, despite the strategic transformation initiated under Audrey Azoulay's tenure, UNESCO has remained a highly fragmented organization along policy lines, horizontally and vertically.

The result is budgetary segmentation and increased politicization. UNESCO rather needs a predictable budget, but that is quite impossible with an unpredictable DG spending most of the public money to hire French comrades at UNESCO. Usually, member states supposedly require accountability for every dollar spent by UN bodies.

Not with the Azoulay administration. She has been given a free hand on the budget and allowed to pursue a fool's errand that has led to the current insolvency," he added.  This is where UNESCO stands today, a UN Agency propitious to the flourishing of corruption, embezzlement, abuse of power and nepotism. We will have more on that. Watch this site.

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