In today’s NYSun, Claudia Rosett reports, Mystery Surfaces Over Apartment of Kofi Annan, i.e., the apartment your tax dollars subsidize if you’re in NY:
As Secretary-General Annan prepares to leave his post at the United Nations, a mystery is surfacing surrounding his apartment on Roosevelt Island, subsidized by New York taxpayers, which is still in use by the family of his brother, Kobina Annan.
The apartment was where Mr. Annan and his wife lived before 1997, when he became secretary-general. The Roosevelt Island home is part of an estate of low-rent state-regulated housing. For years, the Annans saved considerable sums by occupying an apartment meant to help financially strapped low- to moderate-income New York families.
One question Mr. Annan has never addressed is why he and his wife felt comfortable availing themselves of this generous arrangement. Another is how it is that, since Mr. Annan and his wife left that Roosevelt Island apartment 10 years ago to move into the rent-free residence on Sutton Place supplied to the secretary-general, their former low-rent apartment was handed over to be occupied by the family of Mr. Annan’s brother.
…
Kofi Annan’s 1992 Roosevelt Island address and telephone number turn up in a fax sent by his son, Kojo Annan, in late 1996 to his employer at the time, a Swiss firm called Cotecna Inspection SA, which later, while employing Kojo Annan as a consultant, won the U.N. contract to inspect goods imported into Saddam Hussein‘s Iraq under the Oil-for-Food program. In this fax, dated December 10, 1996, Kojo Annan told Cotecna that he could be reached over the holidays at a Roosevelt Island address in New York: 575 Main Street, Apt. 909, for which he gave the same telephone number as the one listed publicly a few years earlier for his father, Kofi A. Annan: 212-355-6938.
…
The questions about the Annan apartment are not the first about various Annan family ventures to have emerged only to go unanswered.The secretary-general misled the press for years about the nature of his son’s business involvement with the Oil-for-Food program. When asked at a press conference last year about a Mercedes that his son shipped into Ghana in 1998 under false use of the secretary-general’s name and the U.N. seal, Mr. Annan ducked the question by accusing the reporter of being a bad journalist.
Can someone please explain to me why we must put up with this crook and his entire family?
EU Referendum has the Verdict on SecGen Annan, but EUR is too kind. Annan leaves a shameful legacy.
Update Let’s hope this is a spoof (h/t Pamela): Oil-for-Food-Denial Conference Opens in Iran
Kofi says (and this is not a spoof):
The UN has also been hurt by “politically-motivated campaigns against the UN” in which “instances of corruption by staff members (are) blown completely out of proportion.”
Well, Kofi, here’s an all-purpose apology for ya.
(technorati tags Kofi Annan United Nations Oil For Food)
