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By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive

UNITED NATIONS GATE, June 10 – How corrupt and unresponsive is the UN under Secretary General Antonio Guterres?

Inner City Press, banned from entry to the UN now 340 days by Guterres, on June 8 exclusively reported and tweeted that the UN Department of Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance (DMSPC) top job would be given on June 10 to Catherine Pollard, who lost case as head of the UN Office of Human Resources Management (OHRM) for her own anti-staff decisions. Then she designed the UN's failed "mobility" policy - and now stands to be rewarded.

  Before 9 am on June 10 Inner City Press wrote to Guterres and his many spokesperson, including "June 10-3: Speaking of Management / the Department of Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance (DMSPC), please confirm upon receipt and well before noon that the SG is giving the top post to replace Jan Beagle to Catherine Pollard, and if so explain how her string of internal justice system losses while head of OHRM impacted or was taken into account in the decision, along with for example her long recent travel to Morocco "to accompany the Moroccan PR" and stay in a hotel in Marrakesh far outside UN DSA ranges. Who paid for that? And her use of business class to Argentina for the South South conference, while interpreters took coach despite UN rules. Also confirm that Moses Abelian is being made head of DGACM."

  No answer, even as Associate Spokesperson Eri Kaneko did the briefing, with this: "United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has appointed Catherine Pollard of Guyana as the next Under-Secretary-General for Management Strategy, Policy and Compliance.  She will succeed Jan Beagle of New Zealand to whom the Secretary-General is deeply grateful for her extraordinary work in management reform in the United Nations system and 40 years of dedicated service to the Organization.     Ms. Pollard brings to the position over three decades of experience in human, financial, information communications technology and support operations and services and has a proven record of transformational leadership in the United Nations system.  She is currently Under-Secretary-General for General Assembly and Conference Affairs, a position she assumed in 2015.  Her previous leadership roles include Assistant Secretary-General for General Assembly and Conference Management and Assistant Secretary-General for Human Resources Management.     She joined the United Nations in 1989 as Chief of National Executive Projects at the United Nations Development Programme.  She then served the United Nations in various capacities, including as Chief Budget Officer for the United Nations Operations in Yugoslavia and Central Headquarters, Chief of the Budget and Finance Section of the United Nations Volunteers, Director of the Peacekeeping Finance Division in the Office of Programme Planning, Budget and Accounts and Chief of Staff in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations.      Ms. Pollard holds a Master’s in Accounting from the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica."  So, Inner City Press had the scoop, and gets no answer from corrupt Guterres and his cronies.

 As head of the Department of General Assembly and Conference Management, Pollard arrogantly flew business class to a corrupt South South meeting in Argentina while forcing her staff to fly standard. She took a long say in Morocco at the expensive La Mamounia spa in Marakesha at well over UN DSA rates; she justified it as "accompanying" Morocco's ambassador and censor Omar Hilale, whose mission's bad faith complaint against Inner City Press' reporting was used by Guterres' Alison Smale to justify its ban.

As Inner City Press was roughed up and push out of the UN, Pollard shrugged. Now she is set to be rewarded, in an increasingly corrupt UN. We'll have more on this. 

   With the UN Office of South South Cooperation so recently exposed as a bribery vehicle in the Ng Lap Seng - President of the UN General Assembly John Ashe corruption prosecution, the vacuous media coverage to date of the upcoming OSSC conference in Argentina has been particularly revealing of the flabby propaganda in which today's UN drapes itself. But now this: Argentina is in a financial crisis and so some months ago informed UN Under Secretary General Catherine Pollard that it would not be able to meet its obligation to pay to fly the UN interpreters to the conference in business class.

  USG Pollard assured Argentina that should could get "her" interpreters to waive their UN right to business class on a trip of this length. But Pollard is not as persuasive as she thought. There was push back, and a secondary crisis loomed.

  Lo and behold, a classic UN solution. Pollard said she could get interpreters to "volunteer" to fly economy - by threatening those who refused with retribution. This Guterres gambit appears to have worked; Pollard brags that enough have volunteers, some cajoled with the promise of a compensated day of rest that all member states, rather than conference host Argentina, will pay for.

  But Catherine Polland, of course, will not herself deign to fly economy. No, she will fly business class as always - as corrupt as the boss of today's UN, the censor, Antonio Guterres, whose spokesman Stephane Dujarric refuses to answer any Press questions on these topics. A fish rots, and continues to rot more and more, from the head. Watch this site.

Background: the Office of South South Cooperation can’t seem to escape the legacy of the John Ashe scandal. When he took the helm in the aftermath, Jorge Chediek promised to completely reform the Office by ordering what ultimately proved to be an unsuccessful audit, catapulting the Office into even more pervasive corruption. Instead of working on agency mandated development work, Mr. Chediek plays tin pot dictator, his staff tell Inner City Press, having formed a sizeable patronage network, which he uses to advance his personal agenda. As a result, an environment of mediocrity and abuse of power prevails in the Office. Over the past year, Mr. Chediek has engaged the services of friends from Latin America, in seeming violation of UNDP regulations.   Since 2017  Chediek has been engaging the services of Bernardo Kliksberg, an Argentinian economist, who according to the Office website is listed as Strategic Advisor for South South Cooperation occasionally writing short news articles for the Office’s website to which Mr. Chediek attaches his name. (In the span of 14 months, Mr. Kliksberg has written 8 articles). This is a seemingly wasteful engagement in line with the general waste of UN resources, as there is already a strategic communications advisor in addition to other senior advisors on Mr. Chediek’s payroll. While rank and file candidates must follow a rigorous UN recruitment process, friends of Mr. Chediek get to jump the line for positions, thanks to his utter disregard for UNDP policy.      According to a Facebook post from April 2018 an MoU was signed between the Office for South South Cooperation and the University of Buenos Aires to establish a chairship of a South South programme at theUniversity, which also happens to be Mr. Chediek’s alma mater. Both Mr. Chediek and Mr. Kliksberg now serve as co-chairs of this programme in the University where Mr. Kliksberg has close ties, having served as chair of several other academic programmes. The chairship, against thecontext of Mr. Chediek already having engaged the professional services of Mr. Kliksberg, is a blatant conflict of interest in violation of UN Staff Rule 1.2 which governs the conditions for outside employment, regardless of whether there is remuneration for the particular engagement. Moreover, appointments like this one violate the UN terms on retention of service, particularly section 3, which outlines the conditions for the contracting of services.      And while Mr. Chediek uses UNDP resources for the services of prolific economists to elevate his stature, the Government of Argentina, recently bailed out by the IMF, plans to drop a few million on an Office of South South Cooperation conference, BAPA+40 this March. Macri’s government may have to answer to the scores of angry Argentinians already fed up with harsh austerity measures as to why it is prioritizing the funding of a conference by a historically corrupt UN office. Mr. Chediek has been using the preparation for this conference to justify the continued retention of his close friends. BAPA+40, which aims to bring international actors together to solve development issues, in reality, is simply a front for Mr. Chediek’s personal ambitions....

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