Disgraced Former U.N. Official Welcomed at High-Level U.N. ConferenceTuesday , May 12, 2009 By George Russell
On July 31, 2008, Guido Bertucci, the top official in a U.N. department charged with promoting good governance around the world, retired in disgrace.
An internal U.N. investigation found that he committed "gross negligence" in handling a $2.8 million trust fund donated by the Greek government, and suggested that Bertucci might be held "personally accountable and financially liable" for the misspent funds, many of which went for purposes unrelated to the intended project.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon handed the Bertucci case over to a U.N. disciplinary committee just two days before Bertucci's retirement — too late to do anything that would affect his retirement or his pension.
Confronted by FOX News at the time, Bertucci maintained he had done nothing wrong.
Now, it seems, the U.N. apparently doesn't think so either. Bertucci has been welcomed back by the world organization as an invited top-level expert at a high-profile conference in Seoul, South Korea, on "Building Our Humanitarian Planet."
The conference was jointly sponsored by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), which includes the branch of the U.N. bureaucracy where Bertucci used to preside, and whose head was Bertucci's boss.
The conference, dubbed World Civic Forum 2009, was co-sponsored by South Korea's Kyung Hee University. It was intended as the international kickoff of a new drive by UNDESA to build support among universities and other civil institutions for the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, which aim to cut world poverty and increase efforts at halting climate change.
Among those attending the opening ceremonies was Han Seung-soo, Prime Minister of South Korea — meaning that the conference was a very high level occurrence on U.N. Secretary General Ban's home turf. (Before taking over at the U.N., Ban served as South Korea's foreign minister.)
Bertucci's role in "Building Our Humanitarian Planet" was widely advertised in the conference program as the chairman of two workshop sessions on "Empowering Civil Society: The Role of Public Administration."
Click here to see the conference program.
The program did not mention Bertucci's new credential as a public administration expert: he is executive director of Governance Solutions International, described on one networking website as a New York-based firm involved in "non-profit organization management."
In one of the conference sessions, which a FOX News camera crew attended, Bertucci made a presentation touting locally administered forestry preservation projects in developing countries to prevent climate change.
Sitting nearby during that session was Roberto Villareal, a senior official of the Division of Public Administration and Development Management (DPADM), the office Bertucci used to head during the lengthy investigation of the Greek trust fund scandal.
• Click here to see video of Bertucci at the conference.
Among those also attending the conference was Sha Zukang, the U.N.'s undersecretary general for UNDESA, who was formerly Bertucci's boss. On this occasion, he represented UNDESA as the conference's major global sponsor.
Click here to see Sha's conference role.
Sha is acutely aware of the charges against Bertucci: the report containing them lingered on his desk for weeks after an 18-month investigation by the U.N.'s watchdog Office of Internal Oversight Services, without any action on Sha's part, before being taken up by Secretary General Ban during the last days of Bertucci's official career.
Indeed, another recommendation of the report was that Sha's department repay $34,000 in wrongly awarded contracts to consultants wrongly assigned by Bertucci — just a small fraction of the funds allegedly misspent in the scandal. There is no evidence that DESA ever acted on the recommendation.
Neither U.N. Secretary General Ban's office nor the office of DESA Undersecretary General Sha responded to a lengthy list of questions from FOX News about Bertucci's presence at the conference.
Among the questions: who invited him, the role of DESA and DPADM in selecting him as an expert, and whether his role in the Greek scandal was discussed before he was invited.
Bertucci's sudden renaissance at an important conference sponsored by his former boss is only the latest mystery surrounding the last years of Bertucci's career, which included several years of stymied, delayed and sidelined investigations into the Greek project scandal, preceded by even more years of unavailing Greek government complaints about DPADM's handling of its money.
Perhaps the biggest mystery of all is the U.N. tolerance for Bertucci's failings — or at least, a deep unwillingness to act on them — even after Secretary General Ban took office on Jan. 1, 2007, after promising to hold U.N. civil servants to "the highest standards of professionalism and integrity."
By that time, Bertucci's involvement in a project known as the United Nations Thessaloniki Center (UNTC) for Public Service Professionalism had been a matter of public controversy for at least three years. Funded with Greek money, it was intended to strengthen public administration in various Balkan countries, and help to reduce corruption.
But by 2003, the Greeks were already demanding an investigation of the way the first $1.1 million of their money had been spent. Their complaints deepened during 2004 and 2005, as the Athens government insisted that it could see nothing being accomplished. U.N. auditors looked into the matter in May 2006, and discovered "indicators of irregularities," — but nothing happened.
Finally, in April, 2007, FOX News revealed that U.N. watchdogs had been appealing to Sha's predecessor as head of DESA to quit rejecting the auditors' recommendations that the U.N. assign responsibility for the situation. That official retired that year and, in effect, tossed the whole problem on to Sha.
Sha began delaying matters himself, as the investigative report on Bertucci continued to sit on his desk.
In fact, even Secretary General Ban's eventual referral of Bertucci for disciplinary action could be considered part of the stalling game. The U.N. customarily never pursues actions against employees who have left the organization, and their retirement pensions are considered sacrosanct, no matter what they have done.
Ban's tardy referral of Bertucci's case meant that he could continue to pay lip service to the notion of enforcing high ethical standards, without having to do anything significant about it, at least in Bertucci's case.
All of which raises the intriguing question: what is so special about Guido Bertucci that his tarnished presence continues to be welcome, even at the highest levels of the U.N., and even on the Secretary General's home turf?
It is a question those high level officials are so far not answering.
George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.
Time to Renounce the United Nations?
Our anticipated war in Iraq has been condemned by many around the world for the worst of all reasons: namely, that America is acting without United Nations approval. The obvious implication is that an invasion of Iraq is illegitimate without such approval, but magically becomes legitimate when UN bureaucrats grant their blessing. Most Americans rightfully resent this arrogant attitude toward our national sovereignty and don’t care what the UN thinks about our war plans. Perhaps our heritage as a nation of people who do not take kindly to being told what to do is intact. Still, only the most ardent war hawks connected with the administration have begun to discuss complete withdrawal from the UN. I have advocated this for twenty years, and have introduced legislation to that effect.
The administration deserves some credit for asserting that we will go to war unilaterally if necessary, without UN authorization. But it sends a mixed message by doing everything it can to obtain such authorization. Efforts to build a “coalition” through the promise of billions in foreign aid dollars only reinforce the perception that we’re trying to buy support for the war. The message seems to be that the UN is credible when we control it and it does what we want, but lacks all credibility when it refuses to do our bidding. The bizarre irony is while we may act unilaterally in Iraq, the very justification for our invasion is that we are enforcing UN resolutions!
Our current situation in Iraq shows that we cannot allow U.S. national security to become a matter of international consensus. We don’t need UN permission to go to war; only Congress can declare war under the Constitution. The Constitution does not permit the delegation of congressional duties to international bodies. It’s bad enough when Congress relinquishes its warmaking authority to the President, but disastrous if we relinquish it to international bureaucrats who don’t care about America.
Those bureaucrats are not satisfied by meddling only in international disputes, however. The UN increasingly wants to influence our domestic environmental, trade, labor, tax, and gun laws. Its global planners fully intend to expand the UN into a true world government, complete with taxes, courts, and a standing army. This is not an alarmist statement; these facts are readily promoted on the UN’s own website. UN planners do not care about national sovereignty; in fact they are actively hostile to it. They correctly view it as an obstacle to their plans. They simply aren’t interested in our Constitution and republican form of government.
The choice is very clear: we either follow the Constitution or submit to UN global governance. American national sovereignty cannot survive if we allow our domestic laws to be crafted by an international body. This needs to be stated publicly more often. If we continue down the UN path, America as we know it will cease to exist.
Noted constitutional scholar Herb Titus has thoroughly researched the United Nations and its purported “authority.” Titus explains that the UN Charter is not a treaty at all, but rather a blueprint for supranational government that directly violates the Constitution. As such, the Charter is neither politically nor legally binding upon the American people or government. The UN has no authority to make “laws” that bind American citizens, because it does not derive its powers from the consent of the American people. We need to stop speaking of UN resolutions and edicts as if they represented legitimate laws or treaties. They do not.
The UN is neither wise nor neutral. All of the member nations have national interests that don’t simply disappear when their representatives enter the UN general assembly hall. Like any government or quasi-government body, the UN is rife with corruption and backroom deals. Worst of all, it serves as a forum for rampant anti-Americanism. Perhaps the time has finally come when more Americans will choose to rethink our participation.
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