www.innercitypress.com/un2ireo050208.html
UNITED NATIONS, May 2, updated May 18 -- The UN was given over Friday night to a strange event, featuring Naomi Campbell, Heidi Klum and Patrick Dempsey. Purportedly its announced $450 a ticket cost benefited an environmental organization, the International Renewable Energy Organization. But the sponsor Paolo Zampolli told Inner City Press that he was not concerned that the group's Advisory Board is "under construction;" there is no mention of the group in Google News or Lexis-Nexis. Zampolli was speaking into a cell phone, surrounded by models. Inner City Press asked of IREO was going to apply to the Economic and Social Council for NGO status. No, Zampolli said, it will be an IGO, an International Governmental Organization. He mentioned the General Assembly, but subsequently said that the IGO application is to ECOSOC. GA President Srgjan Kerim was reportedly at the event. Anything is possible. [Mr. Zampolli says Kerim was there, along with "fifty to sixty ambassadors, and that he paid for the whole party, no $450 tickets were sold.]
Paolo Zampolli gave one business card to a UN functionary -- listing himself as co-chair of Paramount based in Soho, which uses models to sell lofts -- and another to Inner City Press, with a formal IREO logo, complete with UN-like laurels, on one side, and full UN map logo on the other. This seems an abuse of the UN logo, but who's counting? [Mr. Zampolli says that Legal, presumably the UN Office of Legal Affairs, signed off on this use of the logo -- so maybe it's OLA's fault.] A functionary said Zampolli began ID Modeling and then worked for Donald Trump. The 12-page pamphlet distributed was replete with typos and twice listed the re-use of fried oil in Fortaleza, Brazil. It also promoted Clear Blue 104 and Quinoa, "the gold of the Incas," for use in Egypt. In the crowd was Grenada's Ambassador Angus Friday, who one week earlier squired Naomi Campbell through the building. To the best of our knowledge, no cell phones were hurled.
One story below in the Express Bar, Caribbean music was thumping, rice and peas were served and applications for scholarship grants from the Trinidad and Tobago United Cultural Association were being distributed. This was the (keeping it) real UN, the working UN, moving in a parallel and separate world from the smoke and mirrors upstairs.
In the second floor Delegates' Lounge, the month-long absurdity of excluding non-permanent resident journalists and also interns thawed, people mingled without incident and word was that the originator of the ban was the Secretary-General's chief of communications, who has yet to communicate with the press.
All the way down in the basement, a near-riot ensued with the Permanent Forum on the Indigenous came to an end without many want-to-be speakers being given the floor. They rebelled, and security was called. Upstairs, the Organization's headquarters was given over to models and snake oil salesmen. Only at the UN.
And see, www.innercitypress.com/un2ireo050208.html
