Does U.N. Anti-Poverty Cheerleader Have Conflict of Interest?

By George Russell

Published October 27, 2011

| FoxNews.com

CLICK HERE FOR STORY ON FOXNEWS

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and special adviser on millennium development goals to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, is one of the world’s most outspoken promoters of the U.N.’s anti-poverty agenda.

He has now become a high-profile supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, personally joining the throng of protesters earlier this month in lower Manhattan to excoriate “reckless billionaires” for “wrecking this planet” and demanding that President Obama “stop catering to the billionaires ... send [your advisers] back to Wall Street.”

Sachs is also a strident critic of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and of News Corporation, the parent company of both. Last week, the Harvard-trained economist led demonstrators in chants of “Wall Street Journal, Fox News! You’re wrecking this country with your lies!”

Click here to view Sach's Oration.

But when it comes to disclosing his own interests, especially those related to the United Nations, Sachs is more circumspect. And in at least one major instance he appears to have a financial conflict of interest.

One of the most high-profile projects that Sachs is involved in overseeing, the Millennium Villages Project, is a mammoth program aimed at eradicating extreme poverty in portions ofAfrica, in line with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Fox News has learned that Sachs’ Earth Institute was paid about $5 million toward the project between 2006 and 2010 by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.N.’s flagship anti-poverty agency, with $290,000 still in the pipeline.

UNDP also has been working as the “implementing partner” of Millennium Villages Project, meaning UNDP is in charge of the overall project management — under a separate budget raised by another not-for-profit institution co-founded by Sachs and the Earth Institute, known as the Millennium Promise Alliance.

As director of the Earth Institute, Sachs occupies an academic niche inside one of the world’s most important private universities: Columbia University.

The Earth Institute, according to its website, comprises more than 30 research institutes and upwards of 850 scientists, researchers and students, who “study and create solutions for problems in public health, poverty, energy, ecosystems, climate, natural hazards and urbanization.” Elsewhere, the Institute has described itself as “the world’s leading academic center for the integrated study of the Earth, its environment and society.”

“Earth Institute experts work hand-in-hand with academia, corporations, government agencies, nonprofits and individuals,” the Institute’s website says. “They advise national governments and the United Nations on issues related to sustainable development and the Millennium Development Goals.”

Sachs is also a key member of the U.N.’s MDG Advocacy Group, which will be helping to raise and direct donated resources to a variety of other U.N. branches, including UNDP, the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP) and UNICEF, among others, for a wide variety of MDG work.

Click here for details of Sach's MDG advocacy role.

Sachs has also partnered closely with multibillionaire George Soros, and a host of other wealthy private donors, in the ambitious Millennium Villages Project, which aims to help 500,000 people in 10 countries meet all of the U.N.’s MDGs by 2015. These include halving the local extreme poverty rate, reducing child mortality by two-thirds, and ensuring universal primary education, among other things.

Soros has already given $50 million to the project, established in 2006, and promised another $27.4 million over the next five years, along with $20 million in business loans. Other partners in the Millennium Villages project include Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the U.N.’s World Food Program, the U.N. Population Fund, and UNAIDS — as well as the Earth Institute, described in a 2010 Villages report as a “core partner” along with UNDP.

Soros’ money, and many other donations, is funneled through the Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit co-founded by Sachs and the Institute in 2005, and incorporated in Delaware, which calls the Villages effort its “flagship initiative,” and oversees a budget of more than $25 million a year dedicated largely to the Millennium Village project. Sachs is the Millennium Promise president, and a member of its board.

According to Alliance website, “at least 89 percent of these funds go directly to the Millennium Villages Project” -- or to “other programs designed to help communities escape extreme poverty.” The “implementing partner” of the Villages project is UNDP, which “has provided project management and operational support.” According to the Millennium Promise website, UNDP, “as the project’s implementing partner would also be key to ensuring the project’s success.”

Just as Sachs helps to send money toward U.N.-supported projects, and U.N. institutions that help carry them out, U.N. institutions have funneled money toward Sachs’ Earth Institute and on to the Millennium Villages project -- while Sachs, through the Millennium Promise Alliance, with the Earth Institute as a partner, is overseeing UNDP’s “implementation” of the Project.

A Fox News examination of U.N. procurement statistics for the years 2006 through 2010 (the most recent available) show that UNDP has made payments to the Earth Institute of $4,755,630 for the Millennium Villages project. The payments did not go directly to the Earth Institute, but were made out instead to the “Trustees of Columbia University,” which is a registered vendor with the U.N. Procurement Department.

The Institute itself is not a registered vendor. But the fragmentary project details published with the Trustee payouts -- evidently copied and pasted from other project documents -- make clear that the Institute, and the Village Project, are the intended beneficiaries.

Taken together, the details reference a series of sequential payouts to the “African MVs budget,” “MV Breaking the Bottleneck” (a reference to an anti-malarial effort within the Village health approach), “EI” and the Earth Institute. Virtually all of the payments are percentage payouts (or advances) on two overall sums of $2,340,530 and $2,915,100.

Click to view the UNDP payments made to the Earth Institute.

The source of the funds is listed in the procurement reports as UNDP, Sachs’ implementing partner in the Millennium Village Project, and a major manager of the project funded and overseen by the Millennium Promise Alliance.

In other words, the payouts seem to show that Sachs at various times, while serving as Ban Ki-moon’s special adviser on the MDGs, acts as the external fundraiser, overseer, and partner of various U.N. organizations including UNDP -- while the Earth Institute, where Sachs earns his salary as director, simultaneously receives money from UNDP for its own work on the Villages project.

Details of the two multimillion-dollar payouts were confirmed by UNDP’s director of communications, Satinder Bindra, in an email to Fox News. According to Bindra, the two contracts were approved in 2006 and 2008, respectively, with the second contract being an extension of the first.

They covered “the provision of technical advisory services” for the Millennium Villages Project, Bindra wrote, done by the Earth Institute “mainly in the field of agriculture, infrastructure, education, health, and monitoring and evaluation. They also included the implementation of one new MV project in northeast Kenya.”

He added that in 2006 another contract worth $500,000 was signed with Columbia University for “Earth Institute services including technical support to a specific malaria initiative.” The funding for this originally came from the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships, a U.N. “interface” that in turn gets money from the United Nations Foundation, originally established by billionaire Ted Turner.

Bindra said that all of the funding to the Earth Institute was related to phase one of the Millennium Village Project, and aimed to “standardize interventions and methods” across 12 Millennium villages in Africa. The project was subsequently “scaled up in size,” in a second phase. He emphasized that the Earth Institute “has not been hired or paid under MVP2 funding.”

On the contrary, the Earth Institute is a founding partner of the Millennium Promise Alliance, and Earth Institute director Sachs is the Alliance president. So while the Institute received funding from UNDP in phase one of the project, it and Sachs were linked to the handing out of the funding to UNDP, and supervision of UNDP “implementation” in phase two. In any case, UNDP’s payments to the Earth Institute were spread across 2006 to 2010, the entire life of the project to that point.

Binda did not answer email questions from Fox News about whether UNDP considered the complex issues of the relationship or discussed them with the Earth Institute or its director. He emphasized, however, that “both contracts were awarded based on UNDP’s rules and regulations.”

When Fox News questioned Sachs by email about the tangle of relationships, and whether they posed a conflict of interest, the Earth Institute’s director of communications, Erin Trowbridge -- formerly a UNDP communications officer working on the MDGs -- declared by return email that “the premise of your questions is incorrect.”

“Professor Sachs is an unpaid adviser to the U.N. Secretary General,” Trowbridge declared.

“He does not receive payment from the U.N. or Millennium Promise.” The funds from UNDP to the Earth Institute, she said, were a “pass-through” of funds originally donated by Japan’s Human Security Trust Fund. “No money from Millennium Promise to the UNDP comes to the Earth Institute.”

She added that Sachs holds a “purely advisory role at the U.N. -- both as an adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General and as a member of the MDG Advocates.” Sachs’ U.N. role “has no budget oversight nor does it carry any type of managerial responsibility.”

While rebutting any notion that Sachs benefited directly in any financial sense from the relationship, however, Trowbridge did not address the possibility of any other form of conflict of interest, including the Earth Institute’s benefits from the arrangement. Moreover, Trowbridge did not address an additional issue raised by Fox News: Sachs’ role as a facilitator in a more than $1 billion fundraising effort that will also send money to UNDP.

The skein of relationships in which Sachs plays such a variety of high profile and complementary roles, however, raises the question of whether Sachs, as the secretary-general’s special adviser, might be involved in the kind of broader conflict of interest situation that is proscribed in U.N. rules and regulations for regular staffers.

Under Rule 101.2, section (o), the U.N. declares that “A staff member who has occasion to deal in his or her official capacity with any matter involving a profit-making, business or other concern in which he or she holds a financial interest, directly or indirectly, shall disclose the measure of that interest to the Secretary-General and, except as otherwise authorized by the Secretary-General, either dispose of that financial interest or formally excuse himself or herself from participating with regard to any involvement in that matter which gives rise to the conflict of interest situation.”
A subsequent section declares that “The Secretary-General shall establish procedures for the filing and utilization of financial disclosure statements.”

Under a secretary-general’s bulletin published by the U.N. on April 10, 2006 -- the same year in which the Earth Institute began receiving money from UNDP, and while Sachs was in his first term as the secretary-general’s special adviser on the MDGs -- all staff members at the director level or above are “obliged” to file an annual financial disclosure statement with the U.N. Ethics Office, and $1 per year appointments -- like Sachs -- are obliged to file a declaration of interest statement. (On official U.N. protocol lists, Sachs is referred to as an Under Secretary General, a ranking higher than Director, as well as a special adviser.)

A footnote to the 2006 bulletin declares that “Staff members should also be aware of staff regulation 1.2(m) prohibiting staff members from active association in the management of a profit-making business or other concern where there is the possibility of a conflict of interest.”

This year, Secretary-General Ban added to his view of the staff regulations on conflict of interest in a report to the U.N. General Assembly, dated June 27, 2011. It notes that his rules include “provisions governing actual or potential conflicts of interest arising from financial interests, personal relationships between staff members and other stakeholders, the receipt of honors, decorations, favors, gifts or remuneration by third parties, as well as parameters addressing conflicting loyalties that may result from outside employment or occupation or other outside activities, including political activities.”

The report also says that “the experience of the Secretariat and that of some United Nations funds and programs, as well as of other public international organizations” has identified a number of situations as “commonly posing potential conflict of interest.” One of them is “leadership, policymaking or advisory role in external entities (e.g. a governmental or other political role, corporate or for-profit board, not-for-profit board, advisory committee, etc.).”

Click to view Ban's June 27 update.

Ban added another tweak to the conflict of interest issue in 2007. He added a section to thesecretary-general’s website for the voluntary public disclosure of the financial and other interests of senior U.N. officials, including $1-a-year special advisers.

The reason, according to Ban, is that “public disclosure is considered to be an important voluntary initiative as it demonstrates that U.N. staff members understand the importance of the general public and UN Member States being assured that, in the discharge of their official duties and responsibilities, staff members will not be influenced by any consideration associated with his/her private interests.”

Sachs was one of several special advisers who is not listed on the section of Ban’s website devoted to the voluntary public disclosure of financial assets of U.N. officials and declarations of their private interests, although seven special advisers working on the same $1-a-year basis chose to disclose in 2010, the last year on record. Many of these, however, made use of a loophole Ban wrote into the disclosure deal that allowed them to publicly disclose the fact that they were not publicly disclosing anything.

Click to view the declarations.

For his part, Secretary General Ban had not replied before this article was published to questions asked by Fox News about the various activities of his special adviser.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News and can be found on Twitter @GeorgeRussell.

Is Columbia University's Earth Institute channeling the Soros contribution thru UN/UNDP illegal?

George Soros gives $27 million to Africa project

George Soros pledge for Millennium Villages project will help 500,000 people in 10 countries meet UN development goals. George Soros gave $50 million when the project launched in 2006.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS ON CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

George Soros has pledged $27.4 million to aid development in targeted villages across ruralAfrica, the billionaire financier said Monday.

Soros also pledged up to $20 million in loans to support business projects within those villages over the next five years.

The founder and chairman of the Open Society Foundations thanked his board of directors Monday for backing his pledge to the Millennium Villages project despite early misgivings.

Soros says that board members opposed his giving any donations to the project when it was first launched five years ago, considering it risky. But he said he gave money anyway, "because it was my money" and the idea seemed "worth a shot." His $50 million pledge in 2006 was distributed over the next five years.

The project's track record has proved its success, said Soros. "It has been a big challenge, but the project has come a long way," he said.

Somalia famine: Lessons we can take away

The Millennium Villages project aims to help 500,000 people in 10 countries across Africa to reachU.N. development goals and offer a model for the remainder of the continent.

The global development goals, set by the United Nations in 2000, call on all member states to work to reduce child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters in 2015. Other goals include cutting extreme poverty by half, ensuring universal primary education, promoting gender equality and halting and reversing the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

A report on the project's first five years, released Monday, shows that the proportion of households in the targeted villages with access to improved drinking water soared to 68 percent from 17 percent, and students benefiting from school meal programs grew to 75 percent from 25 percent.

Average maize yields more than tripled during the same period, from 1.3 metric tons per hectare (2.5 acres) to 4.6 metric tons per hectare.

Directed by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute, the Millennium Villages Project operates closely with U.N. agencies and with the support of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

"We are thrilled by the rapid gains that the Millennium Village communities are making in the fight against poverty, hunger and disease," said Sachs, Ban's special adviser on the U.N. Millennium Development Goals project.

U.N. Lays Plans to Spend $290M on Aid to North Korea

by George Russell of FoxNews

As the xenophobic North Korean regime of Kim Jong Il appears to be inching toward a murky transition of power, the United Nations is laying plans to spend more than $290 million on a welter of programs in the communist state—including a scheme to produce an algae sold in the U.S. as tropical fish food--provided someone else comes up with much of the money.

The money is by no means a sure thing, especially if the unpredictable North Korean dictator rejects any of the stringent oversight conditions attached to money from some of the important donors the U.N. hopes will chip in.

The U.N. plans, however, demonstrate the determination of the world organization and its most influential backers—notably, the U.S. government, which is the biggest single financial supporter of most U.N. aid and development organizations-- to keep dangling carrots of assistance before the North Korean regime, even at its most provocative.

The U.N. plans persist despite such incidents as the March 26 sinking of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, most likely by a North Korean submarine, and the regime’s continued nuclear saber-rattling, especially toward South Korea. Just last month, for example, North Korea threatened a “powerful nuclear deterrence” in response to a joint U.S.-South Korean antisubmarine exercise prompted by the Cheonan incident.

All those uncertainties fade, however, alongside a bigger one: rumors that the ailing and reclusive Kim, who returned on Sunday from his second trip to China in three months, hopes to install his youngest son, Kim Jong-Un, as his successor-- a process that could already be well under way.

Whatever the outcome of the succession process, at least a dozen U.N. agencies and offices clearly hope to be deeply involved over the next five years in North Korea’s national welfare, in areas ranging from health care and education to sanitation and civil service training, “strengthening knowledge networks” in agriculture, alternate energy development, and transportation, not to mention improving North Korean export trade.

A significant number of the efforts will also go to bolstering the capabilities of the North Korean government, which is not surprising, since they are prepared in close collaboration with various departments of the ruling apparatus. These efforts include a strong focus on health care delivery and education (already problematic in a totalitarian state burdened with a smothering cult of the personality).

But they also include more ambiguous activities in a brutal and thorough-going dictatorship such as North Korea. Among them: coordinating “national knowledge networks and practices,” “management and specialist training,” and—in a country that regularly threatens its neighbors with nuclear and conventional war—a “disaster preparedness and response strategy” spurred by North Korea’s famines and floods. All of these activities are depicted by the U.N. documents as being strictly humanitarian in nature.

The array of plans is laid out in schematic form in a 22-page “United Nations Strategic Framework Results Matrix” for North Korea, which is being presented to members of the supervisory Executive Board of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.N.’s principal development coordinating agency, at a meeting in New York this week.

Click here for the matrix.

The framework is buttressed by UNDP’s own country program for North Korea, which is a $38.3 million portion of the larger total. Both documents cover the period from 2011 to 2015.

Click here for the UNDP Country Program.

The UNDP contribution is noteworthy, among other things, for the fact that most of the money--$34 million—can be counted on to exist. That amount is described in the annex to the country program as coming from “regular” UNDP resources, meaning its core budget. Only $4 million of UNDP’s spending in North Korea comes from other contributions.

A UNDP spokesman underlined—as does the country program—the extent to which UNDP claims to be adhering to newly strengthened safeguards in relation to its North Korean program.

UNDP activities in North Korea exploded into scandal in 2007, leading to suspension of its program until 2009. Among other things, an independent investigative panel subsequently determined that UNDP had wrongfully provided millions in hard currency to the North Korean regime, ignored U.N. Security Council sanctions in passing on dual-use equipment that could conceivably be used in the country's nuclear program, and allowed North Korean government employees to fill key positions.

In the current program, UNDP emphasizes that it has revamped its hiring and currency policies, but adds that “a proper monitoring and evaluation plan is necessary to ensure accountability and transparency in project implementation.” The careful wording indicates that at least some of that planning remains to be done.

While UNDP has actual cash to spend, however, nearly $119 million of some $128 million that UNICEF plans to spend in North Korea over the next four years—about 93 per cent—is expected to come from outside donors, according to UNICEF’s own country plan for North Korea. That is, as UNICEF delicately puts it, “subject to the availability of specific purpose contributions” from those willing to put up the money.

Click here for the UNICEF Country Program.

Much of that volunteer UNICEF money would go toward building up North Korea’s grievously neglected clinical health care facilities, bolstering maternal and early childhood care, early childhood education and large-scale vaccination and medication campaigns to fight AIDs, malaria and tuberculosis.

Most of the anti-disease money is supposed to come from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), a Geneva-based institution financed in part of Microsoft Found Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda. Nowadays, the U.S. government contributes 28 percent of the GFATM’s funds.

And so far, GFATM has only handed over $12.45 million to UNICEF, according to the U.N. agency’s spokesman, Chris de Bono, for its anti-malarial and TV campaign. (According to GFATM’s website, UNICEF has received $18.35 million, out of about $31.5 million approved so far.) According to de Bono, another $56 million is due to come from GFATM starting in 2013, provided a “number of conditions” laid down by the Global Fund are met.

Those conditions, according to Global Fund communications director Jon Liden, largely bear on whether the money is meaning the health goals set by the donors. Among them, for example, is a commitment to cut in half the North Korean death rate from malaria by 2013, using the death rate in 2007 as a baseline (0.31 per 1,000 people, vs. 0.62.).

Click here for Global Fund report on North Korea

Failure to meet the targets could result in reduced funding for the next three years, or a cutoff.

The additional “other” revenues required by UNICEF for 2011-2015 will be raised “as we get into our program,” according to spokesman De Bono, “as is our usual practice.”

The same apparently applies to the bulk of $101 million or so to be spent in North Korea by the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO activities include supporting UNICEF on the malaria and TB campaigns, but also building up North Korean health care, supplying equipment and drugs, and helping institute telemedicine.

But WHO’s own “country cooperation strategy” for North Korea extends only to 2013, meaning all of its fundraising plans for the 2011-2015 have not yet been written.

In the current strategy document, completed in 2009, WHO notes that it will need to use about $3 million of its regular budget and mobilize $20 million annually from voluntary contributions to meet North Koreas needs. This, the document says, “will be a challenging task.”

Just how challenging, perhaps, can be seen in the case of the struggling World Food Program (WFP), whose efforts are outlined in the U.N. Strategic Framework as trying to provide “fortified locally produced nutritious foods” to young children.

In fact, WFP has been running a dwindling operation to provide emergency food to many more of North Korea’s desperately hungry population. But donors stampeded away from the WFP fundraising effort, especially after the Kim regime detonated a nuclear device last year, and questions were raised about whether the government was profiting from the food effort.

Questioned Raised About Who Profits From Aid to North Korea

Currently, WFP has dialed back the goal of its emergency food aid operation from $500 million in 2008-2009 to $91 million.

In the 2011-2015 strategic framework, UNDP and the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization will be working on amplifying North Korea’s meager food supply, enhancing, among other things, areas where “double-cropping” is possible, and adding to fruit orchards and livestock herds. UNDP’s project documents say it will spend $13 million on “seed production in alternative cereals” –defined as wheat, barley, soybeans, potatoes—as well as “wild fruit processing and protein-rich production.”

Some of UNDP’s protein projects, however, seem decidedly outside the mainstream, or even bizarre. In its program document, for example, UNDP says it will “support pilot production of protein-rich plans, such as spirulina and pistia statiotes, which will supply nutrients.”

Spirulina is an algae that has gained a reputation in alternative food circles as a diet supplement. In the U.S., health food websites offer a powdered form for anywhere from $24 to $33 per pound—hardly a cheap source of protein for starving people. It is also sold in the U.S. as tropical fish food. But whether North Korea needs a “pilot project” to produce spirulina is debatable.

As far back as October, 2003, a North Korean news agency declared that the Kim government’s botanical institute had, “after years of researches [sic] completed the method of artificially cultivating spirulina at low cost.” The agency added, “It can be cultivated easily in greenhouses too.” Indeed, spirulina is currently listed as a marketable product on a North Korean export website. And on Aug. 6, a Chinese news agency announced that North Korean researchers had created a new spirulina vaccination “which prevents and treats domestic animals' diseases and increases their weight.” Whether there was any independent verification of that claim was not mentioned in the news article.

As for pistia statiotes, also known as water lettuce, according to the website of the Center for Aquatic and Invasive Plants at the University of Florida, the floating plant is a fast-growing weed, which can block waterways, deplete oxygen supplies in water, and threaten fish populations. It is described as an obnoxious invader in West Africa and Australia. While pistia can survive in temperate climates, it abhors cold and thrives mainly in tropical and semi-tropical environments—not exactly what North Korea is known for.

One of the few places where it is cultivated for its nutritional value is apparently southern China, where it is sometimes used as a supplemental carp food.

In a country full of starving or semi-starving people, of course, almost anything may be viewed as edible. But in the U.N.’s renewed desire to pour money into North Korea, the value of at least some of the projects it is pushing for approval may be hard to swallow.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News.

Herfkens: VN-document kan Herfkens geld kosten

dinsdag 1 april 2008 10:15

(Novum) - Een intern stafbulletin van de Verenigde Naties uit 2002 kan oud-minister voor Ontwikkelingssamenwerking Eveline Herfkens (PvdA) geld gaan kosten. In het document, dat aan VN-beambten is gestuurd, staat dat VN-personeel geen geld of vergoedingen mag ontvangen uit andere bronnen dan de VN. Het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken is in bezit van het bulletin, maar volgens een woordvoerder geeft het geen juridisch uitsluitsel of Herfkens wist dat ze ruim twee ton aan huursubsidie mocht aannemen.

Minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Maxime Verhagen (CDA) blijft het standpunt huldigen dat terugvordering pas mogelijk is als nadere informatie van de VN daar aanleiding toe geeft. 'De VN is bezig met een intern onderzoek. Als daaruit blijkt dat Herfkens van de regels wist, dan volgt terugvordering. Ik weet niet of het bulletin aan iedereen bij de VN is verstuurd', zegt de woordvoerder. De resultaten van het onderzoek worden deze maand verwacht.

Vorige week bleek tijdens een Kamerdebat dat het kabinet de ruim tweehonderdduizend euro die Herfkens onterecht ontving toen ze bij het VN-ontwikkelingsprogramma UNDP in New York werkte vooralsnog niet kan terugeisen, omdat dit op juridische problemen stuit. Verhagen zei dat niet meer is vast te stellen of Herfkens zelf om de huursubsidie heeft gevraagd of dat het ministerie die haar heeft aangeboden. Eerst moet worden bewezen dat Herfkens wist dat ze de subsidie niet mocht aannemen.

Herfkens heeft eerder gezegd dat zij de huursubsidie nodig had omdat ze in een appartement van minstens honderd vierkante meter op loopafstand van het VN-kantoor wilde wonen.