What kind of world?—1
UN distress grows
What kind of world do people want? A world of opportunity for everyone or a world in which the well situated get rich and the poor lose hope? A world of advancing prosperity or a world of stagnation? A world that upholds life or a world that trades in death? A world of peace or a world of war?
What kind of world does the oil and gas industry want?
Everyone in the industry should ask that question every day. From well sites to city streets, the industry's operations and products affect conditions of life everywhere. They exert influences both constructive and not. The extent to which the good about oil and gas outweighs the bad depends heavily on attention the industry gives to questions transcending immediate technical and business concerns—questions like the kind of better world its people are bold enough to envision and willing to help make real.
Program abuse
As has been argued here before, this question rumbles beneath abuses now coming to light with the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program, which operated in Iraq during 1996-2003 (OGJ, Jan. 24, 2005, p. 19). Of three possible responses to mounting evidence of program corruption, two are inappropriate. Both flow from the assumption that corruption is the way the world always has worked and always will. One such response says that, because abuse was inevitable, the UN can do no better than mop up the Oil-for-Food mess and prepare for the next. The other response views the affair as one more reason the UN should cease to exist.
In its assessment of the UN scandal, the oil industry should ask what kind of world these responses anticipate, and whether that's the kind of corrupt and cynical place in which it hopes to conduct business in coming decades.
The superior response assumes that the world can be better and less corrupt tomorrow than it is today and asserts that a reformed UN has a role to play in the progress. It also insists that a UN unable to rise above the world's worst habits won't do.
Allegations are now official that key UN staff members took personal advantage of the oil-sales program that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein manipulated with appalling ease. A Feb. 3 interim report by the Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC) investigating the Oil-for-Food Program levels strong charges against the program's executive director, Benon Sevan. It alleges that Sevan secured from Iraqi officials valuable oil allocations for a small trading company, African Middle East Petroleum Co. (AMEP). It says the transactions generated revenues for AMEP, net of bank fees and surcharges, of $1.5 million. During the period of these dealings, the IIC report says, Sevan received four cash payments totaling $160,000. Sevan told investigators the payments came from an elderly aunt who has since died. Acquaintances told IIC investigators that the woman appeared never to have had that much money. Sevan denies he intervened on behalf of the trading company. Iraqi officials, according to IIC, say otherwise.
The report says, "Mr. Sevan's interventions on behalf of AMEP and AMEP's resulting purchases of oil presented a grave and continuing conflict of interest, were ethically improper, and seriously undermined the integrity of the United Nations." It says Sevan tried to mislead investigators and alleges specific violations of UN rules. It also says investigations continue into the extent to which the official may have benefited from the AMEP deals.
Preferential selection
On other issues, the report says UN officials were preferential in their selection of two major contractors, Saybolt Eastern Hemisphere BV and Lloyd's Register Inspection Ltd. And it finds that politics influenced the choice by former Sec.-Gen. Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Banque Nationale de Paris to handle the program's escrow account. It mentions another potential conflict that has received much attention, involving payments to the son of UN Sec.-Gen. Kofi Annan by a company hired for inspection services, only to say that it is still investigating the matter and will report later.
Corruption deflects progress toward a peaceful world—the kind of world the UN, the oil industry, and most people want—by sustaining hopelessness. It must become the intolerable exception rather than the accepted rule. The UN has work to do.