At UN, Venezuelan Flutes and Beer, Clintons Shadow on Ban, Singapore's Vida Loca

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, July 10 -- The sounds of Venezuelan flutes echoes Friday evening from the UN General Assembly entrance down to the Security Council in the basement.

There was a celebration of the declaration of independence of the “Bolivarian Republic,” complete with Venezuelan rum, arepas and the country's best known beer, Polar.

Ironically Hugo Chavez is dueling with Polar's owner. But as one Bolivarian diplomat told Inner City Press, beer is beer, and politics, politics.

The turn out was good, including Japan's Permanent Representative Takasu who early in the day spoke outside the Security Council about the sinking of South Korea's Cheonan ship, Perm Reps of Luxembourg and Argentina and Bolivia among others, and a jazz trio playing John Coltrane songs.

The hit, however, was the folkloric Venezuelan group, flute and cuatro and stand-up bass. They played a Mercedes Sosa cover song. There were paintings of Bolivarian heroes, and a handout mentioning “the Great Colombia -- seeds of what would later become Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama.”

There was a rumor that pro-Chavez Oliver Stone might make the scene, in the wake of his movie “South of the Border.” A more UN specific rumor was told to Inner City Press: the team of Ban Ki-moon is concerned about getting a second term, due to issues like the Gaza flotilla and Sri Lanka, and the chance that one of the two Clintons might suddenly want the job.

“They'd give Ban some climate change position,” a well place source predicted to Inner City Press.

Hugo Chavez previously at UN, Cerveza Polar and owner not shown

All week people had complained how the UN has gotten less fun with Mr. Ban at the helm. The old Delegates Lounge and its culture have been killed; now even the cafeteria stops serving food at 2:30, and the place is empty by six.

The action has moved outside of the UN. Singapore, for example, threw a party Friday night, on the second floor of its 51st Street mission. The crowd was mostly third and four tier diplomats, the ones who actually do the work in the budget and other committees. The DJ was Latin, playing such songs as Camisa Negra and even the old Living La Vida Loca. Under Ban Ki-moon, the UN is no longer Living La Vida Loca, but rather Seca, Aburida. But where there is life, there is hope. Watch this site.

Footnote: also at the cusp of foreign policy and pop music, Jennifer Lopez was forced to cancel a concert in Northern Cyprus after Greek Cypriots protested.

Lopez claimed she hadn't known there was any issues, just as Sting did after playing in Uzbekistan for $1 million and the daughter of strongman Islam Karimov. For shame..

U.S. Warns on Security of Venezuelan Airports After Inspections Are Blocked

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Homeland Security issued a warning questioning the security of Venezuelan airports, a move that won't immediately block flights but may renew tensions about air travel between the countries.

DHS officials have been blocked from inspecting international airports in Venezuela to determine whether they comply with security standards adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization, according to the department. U.S. inspectors have been trying for the past two years to gain access to Venezuela's main international hubs, including Simón Bolívar International Airport, outside the capital, Caracas, according to the U.S. embassy there.

The Venezuelan embassy in Washington didn't respond to a request to comment. Christopher White, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, said beginning Tuesday, security checkpoints at U.S. airports will post warnings on travel to and from Venezuela. The warnings won't directly block flights or advise Americans to avoid flying to Venezuela; rather, they will state that TSA cannot verify that airports in Venezuela have proper security procedures in place.

"Venezuela has refused multiple requests to allow for such assessments, which are required by U.S. law, and the agency is taking action to warn travelers of this security deficiency," according to an advisory the TSA released Monday.

Martha Pantin, a spokeswoman for AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, which operates the most direct flights to Venezuela from the U.S., said the carrier believes security is adequate at Simón Bolívar International and at Venezuela's other main international airports.

"We think the airports are well run, and obviously for us, the safety of our passengers, our crews and our aircraft are of the utmost importance," Ms. Pantin said.

It is unclear how the Venezuelan government will respond, but tensions about safety and security have escalated in the past. In the mid-1990s, the Federal Aviation Administration lowered Venezuela's safety rating to Category 2, which meant Venezuelan carriers couldn't expand service in the U.S. and had to work with U.S. experts to make improvements. Eventually, Venezuela threatened to limit access to Venezuelan airports for American Airlines and other U.S. carriers. The FAA upgraded Venezuela's safety rating to Category 1 in 2006, easing strains and paving the way for expanded service.

Mr. White said the TSA isn't alarmed that unvetted passengers will board U.S.-bound flights. The vetting of passengers "is conducted by the airlines using the no-fly and selectee watch lists provided by TSA. This issue is with Venezuelan officials' not allowing TSA inspectors to verify that the airports themselves meet international security standards."

There are 10 daily flights from Venezuela to the U.S., Mr. White said, of which eight are operated by U.S.-based carriers. The security warning applies to four international airports serving as the last point of departure from Venezuela to the U.S. They are located in Caracas, Valencia, Barcelona and Maracaibo.

Write to Christopher Conkey at christopher.conkey@wsj.com

UNDP assisted Iranian Regime to set-up and strengthen its terrorist banking network in Latin America

UN's Security Council Resolutions 1737 and 1747 called for the whole world to watch out from Iranian's Regime tentatives to disguise its proliferation and terrorism activities through various forms and mechanisms to evade being detected.

To further respond to the Iranian threats on March 03, 2008 the UN Security Council passed a resolution in which called all UN Member States to "exercise vigilante" over activities of financial and banking systems in their countries with Iran's Banks.

But while member states, were engagted in saveguarding and complying to such World Resolutions, it seems that UN's flagship agency, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) once again opted out claiming immunity of any such Resolutions.

In April 1st, 2008 the United States Mission to the UN (USUN) sent a letter to Ad Melker and Kemal Dervis asking for a disclosure of all Procurement Contracts/Vendors awarded in the past years, the UNDP leadership freaked out.

The whole month of April and May they prepared squads in each Regional Bureau to : (a) identify potential wrong doings; (b) clean-up where possible; (c) destroy all evidence.

As part of a latest clean-up of Financial Accounts and its Vendor List, the office of Darshak Shah and julie Anne Mejia in cooperation with the Regional Bureau of Latin America have deleted from the UNDP's ATLAS at HQs and in about 13 Country Office Business Units (BU) the following Vendor:

#1289: Banco Internacional de Desarrollo SA (Venezuela)

For the past 3 weeks only a handful of officials and selected Finance "experts" were informed about the operation.

The order was clear:

1. If BU had no transaction with the above vendor => ACTION = DELETE;

2. if BU had transactions thru the above vendor and entries were recorded in GL => ACTION = Change Vendor form to read = BID = Banco Inter-americano de Desarrollo;

Since very few people inside Comptroller's and Treasury's offices have the rights to make changes in ATLAS and change as well Vendor INFO Page, is very easy to identify who took such actions.

While is certain that UNDP or so called Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD) has done "nothing wrong" and is un-justifiably being targeted, the entire ATLAS records of BUs from Venezuela, Guatemala, Ecuador, etc, as well as HQs proves the contrary.

One question comes to our mind - how many Iranian officials has UNDP sponsored to travel to Latin America in the past 3 years for "training", "exchange programmes" and "capacity building"??

Another question is how can a Finance Officer either at HQs or COs mistake two disctinct vendors, one called :

• (1) Banco Inter-Americano de Desarrollo; with
• (2) Banco Internacional de Desarrollo SA; ?

Only at UNDP kids - only at UNDP !!!

UNDP Documents show Setronix a supplier to the Quartermaster General of National Arm Forces of Venezuela

The saga of the scanners for Venezuela continue, raising more and more suspicion on the existence of such procurement and the continuing involvement of UNDP in dirty deals with dictators around the world. Now UNDP publish documents which prove that Setronix, the contractor selected from UNDP in a waiver of competitive biding, was and still is a supplier for the quartermaster general for National Arm Forces of Venezuela.

On April 16th UNDP's David Morrison continued with it's version of the Venezuela story. UNDP produced in their For-the-record (blog) two documents from Setronix which were supposed to prove the existence of the scanners.

David Morrison stated that:

Number of scanners: The original number of scanners was 19. During the
lengthy procurement process, however, the price of the scanners went up. Precisely to accommodate this contingency, UNDP Resident Representatives are given limited authority to adjust contracts accordingly. On the scanner contract, after consulting with SENIAT, UNDP reduced the number of scanners to 17, and increased the overall amount of the contract by $5000. Even at the increased price, the L3 Communications scanners were much less expensive than those in rival bids.The procurement was done in two shipments, one for 16 scanners and the other for one scanner. (Click on following two links to view the documents for all 17 scanners: 1, 2).

First of all both these document clearly indicate that Setronix was and is a supplier for the Quartermaster General for National Arm Forces of Venezuela. Instead of proof of arrivals documents are direct indisputable proof of movement/shipment of equipment from one military base to another. Raising direct question of allege use of equipment from "public".

The problem is that both documents produced from UNDP are neither the Certificates of Customs nor the Lending Certificates which, as per UNDP procurement rules, would have been proof of shipment. Both documents are hand created documents which describes the transportation of certain equipment from one city to another city in Venezuela, and nor the dates nor the cities mentioned in the both documents refer to the port of arrival (or airport) of the initial L3 document which UNDP put online.


More important is that the latest document produced from UNDP (2) has been produced on April 3 - 2008, only days after the first story of FOX NEWS, and it contains a different seal of SENIAT on the document. This date is totally different with the statement of Setronix that the equipment arrived in Venezuela in Nov 2007.


But more important is that in the letter to FOX NEWS on April 11, 2008 , Setronix - the UNDP's contractor admits that the 1 unit out of 17 left Miami International airport and arrived at Simon Bolivar International Airport in Venezuela on Nov 11, 2007. (while in the alleged certificate is indicated April 3, 2008). In the same document Setronix indicate that they had received from UNDP - 90% of the contract payment. While none of the documents provided above is prove of existence or of the implementation of the said scanners in any given Venezuelan public Airport, nor they prove that such equipment are for public use by public administration and not the military (as in fact stated in both docs 1, 2)

Based on UNDP internal processes and rules, the above raises important questions:

• So who at UNDP's Venezuela Office cleared this procurement ?
• Who went to the receiving airport or port customs to receive the goods and clear the goods ?
• Who signed on PO and released the 90% of the payments and based on which proof of goods and certificate of good-condition?
• Who cleared this payment at UNDP's HQs Finance Unit and based on which supporting documentation?

How far should member states hear to these lies from a public funded organization, that is so irresponsible that issues payment to a supplier for the Quartermaster General for National Arm Forces of Venezuela, before installation or proof of delivery ?

Where are the pictures of the equipments purchased from UNDP ?

UNDP Procurement: Exceptions Are the Rule

By George Russell

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the U.N.’s anti-poverty flagship, has overridden its own rules requiring competitive bidding for procurement contracts on more than half of the $1.5 billion in goods and services it paid for over the past three years, an investigation by FOX News has determined.

Confidential UNDP procurement documents obtained by FOX show that over the past three years, the development agency has waived competitive bidding procedures for goods and services worth $879 million, roughly 58 percent of the total it disbursed during that time.

The value of the waivers ranged from $259 million, or 50 percent of total purchases in 2005, to a high of $409 million, or two-thirds of the total for 2006, before settling back to $210 million, or 54 percent of the total last year.

The totals are “shocking,” and “scandalous,” according to William Easterly, a former World Bank economist, who is currently a visiting fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. “There could be some extraordinary circumstances involved, but even those cannot possibly explain why the bulk of UNDP operations are waivers of competition.”

The waiver tallies were compiled by UNDP’s Advisory Committee on Procurement (ACP), which records the actions that four UNDP regional procurement committees take in more than 160 countries, and additionally must approve all waivers of competitive bidding on contracts worth $1 million or more.

In reply to a series of questions by FOX News regarding the awards and waivers, UNDP reported the overall awards in the same amount as shown on the documents obtained by FOX News. But in recording the waivers, UNDP offered a different interpretation..

Arguing that the term “waiver of competitive bidding” covered many circumstances, UNDP replied that true “exceptions to competitive bidding” totaled only $78 million in 2005, $120 million in 2006, and $99 million in 2007 — or just 20 percent of the procurement total.

The remainder of the waivers, UNDP said, were cases where “full competitive bidding” took place, “but where the outcome is less than 3 fully qualified offers.” This happens, UNDP spokesman David Morris said, “for reasons outside of UNDP’s control,” such as lack of attention from suppliers, “or for a number of other reasons.”

Morrison added that “UNDP acknowledges that using the same term to cover these two very different sets of circumstances can lead to confusion.”

That “confusion,” however, is embedded in UNDP’s own internal documents, where the distinction Morrison makes does not exist.

The same UNDP documents also show that by far the largest and most frequent requests for UNDP procurement cash — and their subsequent approvals — come from countries with questionable track records for government honesty and transparency. Among the big winners are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Honduras and Iraq.

The volume of procurement funds requested for the Democratic Republic of Congo alone in 2006 — $264 million — represented 82 percent of that year’s entire UNDP African regional bureau requests. The tallies also record that Congo was the African country with the greatest value of procurement spending approved in each of the three years covered in the documents obtained by FOX. The UNDP documents do not state the actual value of the agency’s Congo funding approvals, and do not break out the amount of that money obtained through waivers of competitive bidding.

To see the UNDP documents, click here (large PDF: Firefox preferred).

In 2005, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) ranked 144th on the “corruption perception index” of Transparency International, a private anti-corruption watchdog, while the U.S., by contrast, ranked 17th (and Iceland ranked 1st). In 2006, DRC skidded to 156th place on the index, while the U.S. slumped to 20th. In 2007, DRC fell to 168th place, while the U.S. retained its 20th-place ranking.

To see Transparency International's ratings, click here.

Tallies supplied by UNDP for the top countries in terms of procurement in 2007 were even higher than in the records obtained by FOX News, indicating that the FOX versions did not contain finalized totals for that year. (Approved procurement for 2007, according to UNDP, was $479 million, vs. $386 million in the documents obtained by FOX.) According to the UNDP, Congo received $41 million in 2007, with $5.8 million granted through all varieties of waivers. In this case and others, UNDP maintained, waivers as it now wished to define them would reduce the total by “40% or more.”

According to its own financial rules and regulations, UNDP is supposed to award contracts for goods and services based on the principle of “effective international competition,” carried out “on as wide a geographical basis as practicable and suited to market circumstances.”

Those rules allow for exemptions, or waivers, based on such factors as the existence of monopolies, lack of satisfactory results from a bidding exercise over a “reasonable time period” and “genuine exigency,” meaning pressing need for a product. The widest latitude of all is given outright to UNDP’s chief procurement officer, who can waive competitive bidding when the officer “determines that a formal solicitation will not give satisfactory results.”

UNDP’s procurement procedures became an issue on April 1, when FOX News questioned the agency’s 2007 authorization of 19 airport walk-through body scanners worth $2.3 million, on behalf of the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez.

The scanner purchase was approved without competitive bidding, rather than the “objective, transparent, efficient” exercise claimed by UNDP. The highly respected U.S. defense contractor that manufactured the equipment, L3 Communications, declared that it had only shipped 17 scanners to Venezuela, and these were for the country’s correctional system, not the customs and tax authority cited by UNDP.

Two days later, UNDP posted documents on its website, which FOX News pointed out contained different totals for the scanners, offered two different dates for the same purchase order, and produced a “project document” for the deal that terminated 3 1/2 years before the purchase was made, and never mentioned airports or scanners at all.

Oil-rich Venezuela, with an estimated GDP per capita of $12,800 in 2007, shares one characteristic with many of the biggest beneficiaries of UNDP funding: its low ranking on the Transparency International corruption perceptions index. In 2007, along with four other countries, it ranked 162nd — in the place immediately above the Democratic Republic of Congo.

George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.

UNDP Headquarters in high IT alert after the exposure of its corrupt activities in Venezueala

After the second story on Fox-News on the corruption with the Venezuelan procurement of scanners, Akiko Yuge - Assistant Secretary General for Bureau of Management at UNDP ordered an immediate shut-down of all access to ACP Procurement Database. 

Yuge also dictated that the office of Fridakis and friends implement Phase Nr#2 of the so called "ICT Risk Strategy" which means:

- all internal and external communications including email/VSat/eFax be put under tight watch;

- all phone calls internal and external including voice mail be put under tight watch;

It is also reported that many staffers while they can access CNN and other media as usual they are experiencing 8 - 15 minutes delays in accessing the FOX-NEWS stories, InnercityPress and UNDP Watch.

At least 8 staffers from RBLAC (Latin America Bureau) and PSO (Procurement Support Office) has been called for "questioning" at the Office of UNDP's Chief Investigator Mr. Dubuois.

Anonymous sources say that the OAPR Investigators are nervous and pressured to find the "culprits" of who leaked the Venezuela story outside. Sources also say that the climate inside RBLAC is tense and everyone is afraid of the other, and Professionals have started to finger-point each other, while G-support staff is kept under strict control and out of the "loupe".

Did Setronix Team ever delivered the Airport Scanners ? ...(UNDP will never tell)

As long as the United Nations have immunity, UNDP leadership will never tell the truth about Airport Scanners which never maded to Venezuela, and whereabout of 2.3 Million Dollars that disappeared inside the UNDP's financial books.

This is how it happened:

UNDP LYING FOR THE RECORD (uncovered)

UNDP Statement 1:

An April 1 story on Fox News by George Russell asserts that UNDP awarded a $2.3 million contract for airport scanners in Venezuela without competitive bidding. UNDP made it clear to Mr. Russell that a full competitive process was in fact followed.
[Click here to see UNDP’s response to Mr. Russell’s question.]
[Click here to see UNDP’s full exchange with Fox News.]

Additionally, Point No. 5 of the very document cited by Mr. Russell actually confirms that the contact was competitively bid.
[Click here to view the internal UNDP document.]

TRUTH

If you click on the above document from the UNDP website, the document reads out :

Caso Prepuesto: Solicitud de excepcion a un proceso competitivo, para contratar
con la empresa SETRONIX, C.A. (venezuela), por un monto total de US$
2,375,000.00, provenientes de recursos financieros del Gobierno de Venezuela.

UNDP Statement 2:

Mr. Russell’s claim that “financial payments listings are normally not made public by UNDP’s top management” is also inaccurate. All UNDP contracts valued at more than $100,000 are part of the public record.

TRUTH

If you click on the UNDP's Procurement Notices Site, any search under AWARDS would come empty. Making the above claim from UNDP another LIE.