UN
Guterres Promotes Murky Office
of South South Cooperation
Buying Shredders Banning Press
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Exclusive
UNITED NATIONS,
October 10 – With UN Secretary
General Antonio Guterres
praising 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, and banning from
the entire UN Inner City Press
which exposes it, now a new
exclusive report: after the
scandal involving an August
2015 conference in Macau, the
annual United Nations Global
South-South Development Expo
(this year’s is slated for 28
November in New York)
co-sponsored by the recently
convicted Chinese
Billionaire’s Sun-Kian Group
and UNDP where participants
including U.N. staff members
received iPads worth $599 from
the organizers, an eerily
similar scheme seems to have
unfolded in the Office of
South-South Cooperation.
Documents (enclosed) reveal a
transactiondated 23 August
2018 between the Chair of the
Group of 77 and UNDP via
UNOSSC involving multiple
units of office equipment
including desktops,
projectors, monitors,shredders
and keyboards worth thousands
of dollars.
The agreement between
frequently flying Directors
Mourad Wahba, UNDP Regional
Bureau for Arab States and
Jorge Chediek, Office of South
South Cooperation, claims to
fund activities implemented by
OSSC in support of G77. In
reality, this is another
instance where Senior UN
officials like Mr. Wahba use
the Office of South-South
Cooperation as a vehicle to
hide their conflict of
interest by funneling $100,000
to his country, Egypt. Wahba’s
office specifically insisted
for there to be no record of
this transaction directly
traced to his Bureau. Instead,
RBAS would release the funds
directly to OSSC, bypassing
the “support to G77” factor in
the equation. OSSC in turn
frames this transaction as a
loan.
UN officials like OSSC’s Mr.
Chediek have developed an
influence peddling racket
where tax payers dollars
designated for poverty
eradication initiatives are
diverted to buy favors with
the G77 which Egypt has been
chairing.
Such influence
peddling, particularly from
individuals withties to the
G77, seems to be Mr. Chediek’s
modus operandi. Just
last year, his office spent
over $160,000 to hire two
Senior Advisors to work for
the Chair of the Group of 77.
This year, in addition to
supplying equipment to the
Permanent Mission of Egypt,
documents here
on Patreon, Mr. Chediek
also used his office’s
protected UNDP allocation to
pay over $30,000 salary for
the G77 Chair’s secretary.
Subsequently, Mr.
Chediek has bragged to many
about his influence over the
G77 and how his budget will
beprotected due to his favors
for the G77, evident in the
procurement of this equipment
and recruitment of staff for
G77 Chair. OSSC evades the
scrutiny and accountability
needed to ensure UNDP’s
generous contributions are
committed to actual
development initiatives, and
not used to further the career
and interest of people like
its Director, Mr.
Chediek.
The Executive
Board of UNDP, the
Organization’s primary
oversight body has the
responsibility of ensuring
that all resources committed
for development initiatives
are not diverted for frivolous
purposes. Achim Steiner,
UNDP’s Administrator must be
held accountable for the
corruption and waste in OSSC
and RBAS.
Was recruiting staff and
purchasing equipment what the
Executive Board had in mind
when it allocated $3.5 million
to OSSC? We ask questions but
they are not answered.
Guterres' spokesman Stephane
Dujarric has taken to blocking
Inner City Press which reports
on UN and Guterres'
use of funds on Twitter.
Here now an exclusive interim
report on UN OSSC, even as
Guterres banned
Inner City Press from its
press conference and the UN as
a whole for 91 days and
counting:
As recession
looms in Argentina, its
Central Bank raising its
interest rates substantially
in the past month and after
the country announced it was
turning to the IMF
for a bailout, the government
is set to spend millions of
borrowed dollars on a wasteful
UN conference on South-South
Cooperation slated for March
2019 in Buenos Aires, to spend
millions on an Office led by
director Jorge
Chediek whos aim OSSC
sources say is to use this
conference to advance to UN
Assistant Secretary General
level. His tenure at the
Office thus far has involved a
spate of self promotional
travel while signing off on
dubious Memoranda of
Understanding (MOUs) for
projects that are only
tangentially related to actual
South-South development.
The MoU signings are often
documented on the Facebook
pageof Mr. Chediek, where he
brags about the support from
Guterres, who has refused to
audit the next UN corruption
scandal involving Patrick Ho
the China Energy Fund
Committee and had Inner City
Press which reports on it
roughed up and banned from the
UN.
Its collaboration
with Yingke Group, started
initially when current UNOSSC
Deputy Direcor Grace Wang, a
Chinese national, worked at
BPPS. When she commenced her
role at UNOSSC, this
relationship traveled with
her. This Yingke Group -UNOSSC
collaboration is covered in a
30 May 2018 article entitled
UNOSSC delegation discusses
South-South collaboration with
Yingke Group where it claims
this collaboration "is
designed to be one pillar of
the South-South Cooperation
Poverty Eradication
Facility,aiming to utilize
tourism as an instrument for
poverty alleviation through
improving infrastructure,
generating local employment,
increasing local income, and
developing local capacities."
But what is behind these
buzzwords?
The large number
of Mo Us also attest to the
frequency of wasteful travelby
Mr. Chediek. While million of
Argentinians are subjected to
austerity, the Government of
President Macri has decided to
invest millions in the
ambitions of one man, Mr.
Chediek. In addition to the
Chinese nepotism, Mr. Chediek
seems to have his own
questionable connections.
Recently, OSSC sources
complain, he hired an
Argentinian national for a
senior peace-building post and
one whose brother is the
founder and executive director
of Brandling Latin America, a
London based PR firm with
royal connections through the
company's senior director Lady
Gabriella Windsor?
The Office
continues to operate in highly
questionable ways, giving rise
to these questions: 'This
Office of South South
Cooperation is nested under
UNDP, and provided with $25
million in core money from the
UNDP budget. This budget is
currently protected from any
change in UNDP's financial
situation. It should be noted
that the budgets of the other
UNDP-funded organizations, UN
Volunteers and UNCDF - which
had their strategic frameworks
approved by this Board, and
whose monitoring and
evaluation frameworks are
clear - are not protected.
So... I) When will the
Office's budget, monitoring
and evaluation and results be
reported to the [UNDP
Executive] Board, and will
this be for decision? 2) Will
the Office start producing an
annual report again, and when
will this be available to the
Board? 3) How is the Office
working with UNDP's evaluation
and audit offices? 4) Where
will the Office's results be
reported and collated? 5) How
does the Office comply with
UNDP's transparency
requirements? We also note the
Office's fundraising
activities, and the very
generous investments totaling
$150 million this year by the
Government of India.
We'll have more on Guterres
and this Office, in India and
beyond. Amid record
unemployment rates and long
soup kitchen queues is BAPA+40
really a priority item for the
Government of Argentina?
What is happening to the UN
under Guterres, and his
spokesman Dujarric who blocks
and bans the Press? Watch this
site.
***
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