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Cotecna Paid Kojo Annan to Protect Cotecna's Business in Ghana
From The New York Sun, an article by Claudia Rosett, a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and an adjunct fellow with Hudson Institute..... investigators are now looking into new information suggesting that the younger [Kojo] Annan received far more money over a much longer period, even after his compensation from Cotecna had reportedly ended. ..... The younger Annan stopped working for Cotecna in late 1998, but it now turns out that he continued to receive money from Cotecna not only through 1999, as recently reported, but right up until February of this year. The timing coincides with the entire duration of Cotecna's work for the U.N. oil-for-food program. It now appears the payments to the younger Annan ended three months after the U.N., in November, 2003, closed out its role in oil-for-food and handed over the remains of the program to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. This latest bombshell involving the secretary-general's son was confirmed Wednesday by Kofi Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, in response to this reporter's query, based on information obtained elsewhere. In an email, Mr. Eckhard wrote: "I was able to reach Kojo's lawyer this morning. He confirms that Kojo Annan received payments from Cotecna as recently as February 2004. The lawyer said that these payments were part of a standard non-competition agreement, under which the decision as to whether to continue the payments or not was up to Cotecna." Mr. Eckhard added that, according to Kojo Annan's lawyer, the information has "been reported" to the U.N.-authorized inquiry into oil-for-food, led by a former Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker. Labeled as compensation for Kojo Annan's agreeing not to compete with Cotecna's business in West Africa, the post-employment payments were in the amount of $2,500 per month, according to another source with access to the documents. If the payments were continuous over the slightly more than five-year period involved, that would have totaled more than $150,000. ..... Cotecna earlier this year denied any wrongdoing, saying that Kojo Annan's portfolio involved West Africa, not the U.N. or Iraq. Kojo Annan's lawyer at the London-based firm Schillings said the younger Annan is cooperating with the Volcker inquiry, but would not comment to the press on his payments from Cotecna. ..... A letter ... written January 11, 1999, by Cotecna CEO Robert Massey [outlines] the terms of a $2,500 per month "compensatory indemnity" in return for Kojo Annan's agreement to "refrain from any similar consultancy or employment." .... A previous Rantburg posting, titled A Primer About Cotecna, the Food-for-Oil Program, and Kojo Annan, pointed out that Cotecna is a company that is much older and larger than its one UN contract that it performed for the United Nations during 1998-2003. Cotecna was founded 30 years ago, in 1974. Cotecna has a workforce of about 4,000 personnel in over 100 offices and holds inspection contracts with 13 governments -- Burkina Faso,Comoros, Ivory Coast, Eduador, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Togo, and Venezuela. Cotecna has no special relationship with the United Nations. The overwhelming majority of business is directly with individual governments. Cotecna helps developing, still quite corrupt, countries to professionalize their customs services. In particular, in Ghana (the Annans' home country), Cotecna has a ten-year contract with the Government of the Republic of Ghana. Those two parties formed a joint venture, called Gateway Services Limited [GSL], which is 70% owned by Cotecna. When the ten-year contract expires, the business can be taken over completely by Ghanan government or the joint business can be extended with another contract. Cotecna apparently believes that its payments to Kojo Annan will make the second outcome more likely, but understandably wanted to keep such payments secret. In 1999, Cotecna explained to the UN Under-Secretary-General for Management to his satisfaction that Kojo Annan's business activities were limited to west Africa, did not involve the UN, and played no role in Cotecna's winning the UN contract. Now Kojo Annan is trying, through his lawyer, to explain the same limitations to Claudia Rosett, but her stubborn misintpretation of the situation make her deaf and blind to all such explanations. Since Claudia Rosett likes to traffic in reckless speculations about other people being corrupted by their own personal greed, let's do the same about her and see how she like it. A few years ago, few people would have recognized her name. She was an obscure, mid-level pundit, lost in the multitude other such would-be pundits. Now, however, she's become world-famous because of her slanders of the Annans. Now suddenly she stands at the threshhold of major punditry. She enjoys sinecures with two major, rich foundations. We can be sure that her income from writing and speaking have sky-rocketed. A Google search for the two words Rosett and Kojo indicates that at least 1,230 websites report her speculations about him. Bizarrely and pathetically, even the normally sensible Belmont Club has begun to compile a complete list of all websites that mention Rosett's newest article. In these circumstances, she will not entertain any explanation about Cotecna and Kojo Annan that does not incriminate Kofi Annan in personal corruption involving the Oil-for-Food Program. The enventual cost for her will be, though, that when the Volcker investigation and all the future US Congress investigations and all other investigations by objective journalists confirm again and again that this story is a groundless hoax, then maybe she will finally take her rightful place in the history of US journalism alongside Dan Rather as a fool who persistently peddled a totally wrong story in the year 2004. Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-11-28 |
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