U.N. seen slow to address corruption

By Patrick Worsnip

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. internal watchdog accused the world body on Thursday of laxity in rooting out corruption, as Western and developing countries clashed over how the problem was being addressed.

The comments by Inga-Britt Ahlenius came as she presented a U.N. committee with a report by a task force that details its investigations over the past year into cases of alleged graft linked to U.N. contracts worth over $20 million (12 million pounds).

Ahlenius heads the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), which runs the controversial and soon-to-be-disbanded Procurement Task Force, set up three years ago following a scandal over a former U.N. oil-for-food program with Iraq.

Ahlenius told the General Assembly's budgetary committee that the task force's 250 investigations had highlighted a "serious problem" of defective U.N. internal control that laid the organisation "open to waste, abuse, fraud and corruption."

"Historically the (U.N.) organisation has been slow and even resistant to hold culprits accountable -- and not proactive in seeking to recover damages caused by corrupt conduct," said Ahlenius, who is Swedish.

She called on the United Nations to send a "strong message" that it was serious about addressing corruption both within its own ranks and among individuals and companies it dealt with.

The task force's report, covering July 1, 2007 to July 31, 2008, said it had probed five significant corruption schemes involving U.N. offices in Kenya, Greece and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as the New York headquarters.

It said the total value of the contracts involved was more than $20 million but it gave individual figures only for a case in Nairobi, where it said an unnamed female U.N. employee had tried to steer contracts totalling more than $350,000 to a company associated with her husband.