| Week
After Corrupt UNDP OSSC Director Chediek
Left Now Egyptian Games of Guterres
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Exclusive Patreon
BBC
- Guardian
UK - Honduras
- CJR -
PFT
UN GATE, Sept 26
– The Office for South-South
Cooperation (OSSC) is well
known for being the most
corrupt office in UNDP, with
its notorious history spanning
nearly two decades. In 2015, a
colossal bribery scandal led
the FBI to the arrest and
subsequent prosecution of
Chinese billionaire Ng Lap
Seng and former President of
the UN General Assembly John
Ashe. (The lone reform to come
from that has been ignored by
new PGA Volkan Bozkir, here.)
Now a week after
disgraced UNOSSC’s head Jorge
Chediek’s departure, power
hungry officials are already
scrambling to fill this
coveted role.
Among those is
UNDP Achim Steiner’s acting
Deputy, Associate
Administrator Mourad Wahba
whom ICP has previously
exposed for siphoning UNDP
funds for the benefit of the
Government of Egypt via
UNOSSC.
It’s clear
that Wahba continues to use
his position to wheel and deal
for his government. An email
thread he erroneously sent to
all UNOSSC staff is one for
the books. Responding to a
message on the appointment of
an acting Officer-in-Charge of
UNOSSC (a fellow Egyptian),
Adel Abdellatif, Mr Wahba goes
on to insult the staff of
UNOSSC while offering advice
for his new stooge in
OSSC.
A photo here.
The email, ridden
with Egyptian dialect Arabic
slang reads: “"Good
morning The director or
Achim’s Office contacted me
yesterday to thank you and to
thank your brother's"
political" message. "I told
him: shame on you! This is the
training of Foreign Affair
guys from the past, not from
today. A piece of advice
for the South South snakes:
Slaughter the cat in the first
meeting. Do you have news
about Chokri Son of Sameh?
Idriss keeps
asking..”
This cryptic message refers to
the staff of UNOSSC who
continue to expose the
corruption that officials like
Wahba try so diligently to
hide. But in this email, Wahba
doesn’t mince words about the
true intentions of officials
who continue to misuse UN
funds. After instructing the
incoming officer in
charge Egyptian national
Mr. Adel Abdellatif to be
decisive in ridding the Office
of “snakes”, he goes on to
make reference to the son of
Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh
Hassan Shoukry. And who is
Idriss?
Certainly not the
next head of UNOSSC because it
would be a shame to continue
the Office’s legacy of botched
recruitments, fraud, and abuse
of power. Is Achim Steiner in
cahoots with Wahba? If not,
he’s certainly aware of this
email because he was cc’d on
it.
So what
measures will he implement in
light of this email? Will
Achim do the honorable thing
and instruct his Deputy to
apologize for insulting an
entire Office, or will he
continue to ignore the
obvious? Who among OSSC staff
is the new acting Director
instructed to
persecute?
Steiner
email here.
Finally it’s
increasingly apparent that big
donors have no business
investing in this Office,
especially when their
governments are more cash
strapped than ever as a result
of the COVID-19 pandemic.
***
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