Kofi, Kid and Cotecna

From the Telegraph:

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, will face fresh calls for his resignation from American opponents this week after being criticised by the commission he set up to investigate the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal.

In a report due out on Tuesday, Mr Annan will come under fire for failing to recognise potential conflicts of interest relating to his son, Kojo, who worked for a Swiss company awarded contracts under the controversial scheme.

The criticism is expected to focus on three previously undisclosed meetings that Kofi Annan attended with executives from the company, Cotecna, between 1997 and 1999. The commission, headed by Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, will also report that Mr Annan failed to identify serious administrative problems within the UN. Congressional investigators in Washington are pursuing six different inquiries into the oil-for-food scandal.

Norm Coleman, a Republican senator who heads the Senate governmental affairs investigations sub-committee and called for Mr Annan to step down last year, said: "The organisation [UN] has to ask the question: 'Can you achieve the type of massive reform needed if the guy who was in charge during all these mistakes is still running the show?' "

UN officials are still hoping to switch the focus from Mr Annan to his son. Kojo Annan will be criticised for trying to trade on his family name and misleading his father about the extent of his business links to Cotecna, which had lucrative contracts to inspect goods going into Iraq under the oil-for-food programme. In all, he is believed to have been paid more than $300,000 by the company.

Officials who have seen the report told The Wall Street Journal that Mr Volcker will clear Kofi Annan of any suggestion that he rigged the programme or received any financial benefit from it.

Yet the report will cast fresh doubt over whether Mr Annan, whose term is due to end next year, can survive to implement the far-reaching UN reforms announced last week.

The secretary-general's critics have latched on to Mr Annan's failure to mention his meetings with Cotecna executives, even after he publicly criticised his son for not telling him that he had remained on the company's payroll for five years longer than previously believed.

Both Cotecna and Mr Annan told the Volcker commission that the meetings, one of which took place at Mr Annan's office at the UN in New York, were unrelated to the oil-for-food scheme.

"Why did Kofi not say before that he had met with Cotecna, especially if they really did have nothing to do with oil-for-food?" a congressional investigator asked The Telegraph. "It just looks like another attempt to keep things hidden. These sins of omission keep adding up."

This guy should hook up with Jimmy Carter. They can put their heads together and make an ass of themselves. It's way past time to hang it up Kofi, it's over, finished, finito! Say goodnight, Kofi.