The United Nations Developmental Program scandal has been going on for about a year now and finally more details about the corrupt relationship the UN was keeping with North Korea:

Nuclear-armed North Korea used UN-linked bank accounts to secretly transfer funds in connection with alleged weapons sales, a US Senate probe showed Thursday.

The investigation was held following media reports last year about alleged mismanagement in the operations in North Korea of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the largest UN development agency.

The probe discovered that the UNDP operations in the hardline communist country "did not follow" standard policies and were "undermined by management and operational deficiencies," said Senator Carl Levin, head of a panel that conducted the inquiry.

Many of the "deviations" in the UNDP, which suspended operations in North Korea last year, stemmed from demands by the government in Pyongyang, he said at a Senate hearing on the issue Thursday.

Pyongyang, for example, pushed the UNDP to conduct its financial transactions using the North Korean state-owned Foreign Trade Bank, he said.

But the UN agency had no access to the bank account records, said the Democratic lawmaker chairing the permanent Senate panel on investigations.  [AFP]

For those not familiar with this scandal basically the UN staffers in Pyongyang were giving millions of dollars to North Korea for "developmental projects" in the country.  However, for whatever reason the UN staffers were allowing North Korea to deposit the money in a North Korean bank and were allowed no oversight of the bank records.  Additionally the UN staffers were not allowed to inspect the status of the "developmental projects".  So basically this UN crew in Pyongyang was Kim Jong-il’s own personal ATM. 

When these facts came to light this is what the UN had to say:

UNDP was "surprised to learn" that the bank had routed some outgoing UNDP funds through a Chinese firm, International Finance and Trade Joint Company (IFTJ), with links to alleged weapons sales, Levin said.

"Surprised"?  How can the UN be surprised that a known gangster like Kim Jong-il would not use unmonitored money for developmental projects?  This would be like the UN giving Tony Soprano millions of dollars to go build playgrounds around the city and then be surprised when the money is used for illicit means, which is what Kim Jong-il used it for:

 He said "two UN payments totalling about 50,000 dollars, that had been made by UNDP on behalf of other UN agencies, had gone to an entity that the State Department later linked to North Korean weapons sales," including ballistic missiles.

The money was then moved through Banco Delta Asia in Macau which last year faced heavy Treasury Department sanctions for money laundering.  The blatant corruption of this scandal is shocking considering how easily it could have been stopped if remotely competent people were running the program.  Last January UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon vowed to investigate and get to the bottom of the scandal.  However, it is clear now that the Claudia Rosett was right and that the UNDP Scandal would be Ban Ki-moon’s first cover up.  Unfortunately for him, the US Congress has opened their own investigation into it and this scandal keeps getting uglier and uglier.

Democratic Senator Carl Levin should be recognized for leading the investigation into this scandal and hopefully he keeps the heat on the United Nations.  It appears the North Korea issue is beginning to get increasingly more bi-partisan interest which is good see.   

I haven’t even read through the entire Congressional report and it’s exhibits yet.  I will have follow on postings once I get a chance to digest all the information in the report. 

In the meantime make sure go over to One Free Korea and read his detailed posting on this scandal. 

Also head over and read Claudia Rosett’s take on this as well.  Rosett deserves a lot of credit for keeping this story alive because she has been one of the few voices bringing this scandal to life.

Like I said before more to come once I read through the report.

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