By Claudia Rosett
The phrase “born again” is taking on a whole new meaning in a scandal now brewing at a little-known but important United Nations agency based in Switzerland, where an auditor has discovered that the director general, Kamil Idris, has for almost 24 years been using two different birthdates, nine years apart. In recently amending the discrepancy, Idris has changed his current age in U.N. records from 61 to 52.
That would be bizarre in any context, but it is an alarming discovery at the World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, a U.N. agency with an annual budget of more than $200 million that is supposed to be one of the worldÂ’s great bastions of accurate record-keeping. Based in Geneva, WIPOÂ’s mandate is to promote the global protection of intellectual property rights. Launched as a U.N. agency in 1974 and rooted in more than a century of international treaties, WIPO serves as a registry, database guardian and guide for international copyrights, patents, trademarks and intellectual property law.
Nor is this the only scandal to entangle WIPO and Kamil Idris, a citizen of Sudan who has run WIPO since 1997. Idris is only the second man to serve as WIPOÂ’s director general since it became a U.N. agency, and he has earned a reputation for ruling in a vice-regal style. Plans for a lavish, $50 million renovation of WIPOÂ’s headquarters in Geneva led to concerns about possible bribery. The Swiss criminal investigation launched in 2004 unearthed payments of $3 million to $4 million from WIPO contractors to a Ghanaian businessman, Michael Wilson, who in turn had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Swiss account held by a WIPO assistant director, Khamis Suedi. Wilson, whose case is still open, could not be reached for comment. Suedi, who has denied any wrongdoing, left Switzerland in 2005.
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