At the United Nations, as a year of many scandals draws to a close, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been trying to stuff some big unanswered questions down the memory hole--with mixed results. No, I'm not talking only about the files Mr. Annan's former chief of staff shredded during the Oil for Food investigation, or the discounted duty-free Mercedes allegedly shipped to Ghana in late 1998 by the secretary-general's son, Kojo Annan, under false use of his father's name and diplomatic perquisites. Hanging over all this is another mystery that despite the magnitude of the question seems of strangely small concern to the secretary-general: What has become of the former head of the U.N. Oil for Food program, Benon Sevan?Mr. Sevan has not been called to account under any regime of law. Having been retained in New York by Mr. Annan after Oil for Food ended as a $1-a-year "special adviser" to assist in the inquiry into the program, Mr. Sevan skipped town in mid-2005, shortly before Mr. Volcker weighed in with his allegations on Aug. 8 of this year. Since then the U.N. has said that Mr. Sevan, despite the allegations against him, is entitled to collect his U.N. pension--which a spokesman for Mr. Annan confirmed to me again this week is "untouchable." The U.N. will not give out any information on Mr. Sevan's current location.
But to such sketchy accounts, investigators for Rep. Henry Hyde's International Relations Committee are now prepared to add some illuminating details--starting with their encounter with Mr. Sevan himself, less than three months ago, in Cyprus. As it happens, they were not expecting to find Mr. Sevan in person. They went to Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, trying to track down details of the case, including the fate of Mr. Sevan's deceased aunt, Bertouji Zeytountsian. By Mr. Sevan's account to Mr. Volcker, this aunt, while living in Nicosia as a retired government worker on a pension, had sent him funds totaling some $160,000 during the last four years in which he was running Oil for Food, 1999-2003. The day after the U.N. investigation into Oil for Food was announced, in March, 2004, Zeytountsian fell down an elevator shaft in her Cyprus apartment building. A few months later, she died.
Mr. Hyde's investigators decided while in Nicosia to have a look at the elevator shaft. On Oct. 14, a Cypriot police official showed them the way to the building. There, printed plainly on a mailbox at the entrance to the apartment block, was the name not of Mr. Sevan's aunt, but of Benon Sevan himself. After shooting the picture shown nearby, the investigators went up to the eighth-floor apartment where the aunt had lived. They knocked, and the door opened.
There stood Benon Sevan. As one of the investigators describes it, Mr. Sevan came to the door "in shorts, no shirt, and sandals, smoking a cigar." Apparently everyone was surprised to come thus face-to-face. Mr. Sevan was polite but did not invite them in. They chatted across the threshold. He told the congressional investigators to address all questions to his lawyers, saying, "My conscience is clear."
The investigators turned to go, and, as one of them recounts, as they headed for the stairs, Mr. Sevan told them, "You can take the elevator. It's fixed now."
The U.N., however, remains broken.
The Manhattan District Attorney's Office opened an investigation into Mr. Sevan earlier this spring, and confirmed to me Tuesday that the investigation is continuing, but the New York prosecutor has no jurisdiction in Cyprus and cannot in any event bring charges against Mr. Sevan unless Mr. Annan lifts his diplomatic immunity--which it seems Mr. Annan has not done. A spokeswoman for the Cypriot mission to the U.N. says that "the issue" of Mr. Sevan is "on the desk of the attorney general in Cyprus, who is studying the case."
That leaves Henry Hyde's investigators, one of whom tells me the attorney general of Cyprus, Petros Clerides, assured them during a meeting in Nicosia, in October, just before they came face-to-face with Mr. Sevan, that if given the evidence, Cyprus "would prosecute." But since then, says this investigator, Cypriot authorities have been "uncooperative." It seems that Mr. Volcker's committee will deliver the evidence only if asked, and there is no sign yet that Cyprus is asking. Mr. Hyde's investigators say they are "going to follow up" and "will be in touch with the Cypriot ambassador."
Perhaps when Mr. Annan gets done tracking down that missing Mercedes, he could lend them a hand.