UN Oil for Food scandal - coverage from New Zealand

Now the New Zealand Herald is giving the story coverage. In an article from this weekend, reporter Roger Franklin says: bq. Shams, scams and Kofi Annan Almost a year ago, when kitchen workers at United Nations headquarters walked off the job in a dispute over holiday pay, the cream of the world's diplomats knew just what to do. They thronged to the site's five unattended restaurants and stole everything that wasn't nailed down. And more recently: bq. This time it isn't cutlery, baked hams and wine-cellar locks that have gone missing, but at least US$11 billion ($17 billion), depending on who is doing the counting - or rather, the guessing, since the UN has been curiously disinclined to investigate where all that money went. bq. Whatever the sum involved, it vanished from the UN-administered Iraq Oil For Food programme, and unlike last year's petty looting, those at the centre of suspicion aren't lowly bureaucrats but a tight cluster of high-up insiders centred on the office, family and inner circle of Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself. And more -- talking about opponents to the Iraq war: bq. Remember how opponents of the Iraq War kept citing the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children perishing for want of medicines? Well, Oil For Food was supposed to guarantee that those supplies arrived, but apparently few did. Went into Saddam's palaces -- that is plain to see. Roger also talks about this little incident: bq. ...and the UN has other matters that it would much prefer to talk about, starting with a $1.2 billion ($1.86 billion) interest-free loan from Washington to renovate its decaying New York headquarters. George Bush rejected the request, saying the UN could have the money at the standard interest rate now being charged to American home-buyers. Heh... Plain spoken - I like that in a president.