By Matthew Russell Lee, CJR PFT CEFC Video
UNITED NATIONS GATE, April 11 – How corrupt and lawless is the United Nations of Secretary General Antonio Guterres? His head of Security Peter Drennan did not in his tenure even respond to detailed complaints about his Lieutenant Ronald E. Dobbins roughing up the Press while it covered Guterres' deals in the UN Budget Committee. Then Drennan directed his officers to try to get NYPD to restrain Inner City Press on the sidewalks of New York City, 96th Street most recently. Now Drennan is gone, too late, and another Guterres Guard is being recruited. Whoever it is must answer for the decay of DSS under Drennan, which drove at least one officer to suicide.
And now on April 11 banned Inner City Press reports, from a Non Aligned Movement statement to an informal meeting convened by censorship accepter PGA Espinosa Garces, in a line of corrupt PGAs: "The NAM expresses concern regarding some excessive behaviour of some UN security personnel in exercising their daily duty towards UN Member States delegations in different occasions, either in the margins of the UNGA opening sessions or during different other high-level meetings that take place in the premises of the UN Headquarters. Has the Secretariat taken any measures to address such attitudes of some security personnel?" First stop: LtRonald E. Dobbins, who beats up the Press and tells others to refuse to give their names. Also this question: "NAM requests the Secretariat to provide the UN Member States with comprehensive information concerning the Bookshop activating in the United Nations premises (books selection process, regulation, management, monitoring, etc)." That's falsecomplainer to Alison Smale (and Twitter blocker of the Press, vain jogger) Maher Nasser. We'll have more on this.
Here's the replacing Drennan announcement: "The Secretary-General is pleased to announce the following job opening: Under-SecretaryGeneral for Safety and Security, based at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. In order to ensure a wide pool of candidates for this position, the Secretariat welcomes applications to supplement the Secretary-General’s search and consultations. Applications of women candidates is strongly encouraged. Applications should include the curriculum vitae of the candidate with full contact information (email and telephone) and must be sent to the Secretariat of the United Nations by 29 April 2019. Applications may also be sent to eosg2019dss@un.org." We'll have more on this. In the midst of Inner City Press' questioning in 2018 about Guterres' links to now convicted UN bribery Patrick Ho's China Energy Fund Committee and Guterres' failures on Cameroonand elsewhere, his UN Security twice roughed up Inner City Press on June 22 and July 3, 2018.
Then after Inner City Press filed a New York Police Department complaint against the UN and its Lieutenant Ronald E. Dobbins, none of its written questions to UN Security chief Peter Drennan and Guterres were answered.
After waiting in line, I showed my drivers license and the ticket and was waved into a second line for the metal detectors, where a sign said no video allowed. Periscope video here, until voluntarily turned off. Halfway through the line, four UN Security officers and a supervisor came over and ordered me to leave, saying I am on their barred list. I asked to see the list. I was pushed from behind and told I would be shown the list outside. They took the paper ticket, saying it is property of the UN. (There's still this photo.) But once they pushed me out onto the stairs, no one came out with the list. First of a series of Periscope videos here. To this has the UN sunk.
After a UN media accreditation "review" that did not include any opportunity to be heard for Inner City Press, Guterres' Under Secretary General Alison Smale on 17 August 2018 issued a letter "withdrawing" Inner City Press' UN media accreditation. Smale was asked how Inner City Press could appeal, including by UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression David Kaye, but did not answer that.
On 3 September 2018, facing the prospect of being unable to enter the UN to cover the General Assembly "high level" week for the first time in a decade, Inner City Press submitted an application for accreditation. But there was no action on it - in fact, during high level week, it emerged that Inner City Press had been put on a non-public "barred" list such that even if invited by a member state or UN agency, it could not enter the building.
Patrick Ho of CEFC was convicted on 5 December 2018. Inner City Press again exclusively reported that Guterres had failed to include his paid position on the board of the Gulbenkian Foundation in his Public Financial Disclosure covering 2016 - and that Gulbenkian in 2018 was trying to sell its Partex Oil and Gas affiliate to CEFC as Guterres refused to audit CEFC and had Inner City Press which asked roughed up and banned.
And now on 2 January 2019 Smale's Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit has issued a denial of Inner City Press' September application for accreditation, stating only that
"Greetings Matthew LEE from ICP INNER CITY PRESS,
Your media accreditation request, with reference no: M72295425, has been declined for the following reason: Accreditation was withdrawn on 17 August 2018."
This is Kafka-esque. Accreditation was withdrawn without any hearing or chance to appeal, but that decision is used to deny future accreditation. While preaching about due process and freedom of the press, Guterres' UN has a "one strike and your out" policy - even if there is no strike. The alleged violations were filming in place Smale's own MALU staff told Inner City Press it could film with out an escort, and recording her deputy in a known media stakeout position.
Guterres is a censor, to conceal his own conflict of interest. He has failed many people, including the Anglophones being killed by the Cameroon government of Paul Biya, from whom Guterres accepted a golden statue and Budget Committee favors. This is corruption and the reporting on and exposing of it will not cease. No due process censorship by the UN is UNacceptable.
While Guterres was refusing throughout 2018 to begin any UN audit into China Energy Fund Committee, implicated in the UN bribery prosecution US v Patrick Ho, Guterres had a secret: his role on the board of Gulbenkian Foundation which was trying to sell its Partex Oil affiliate to CEFC. See Inner City Press' first exclusive report here.
Today Inner City Press continues its exclusive series on some of the CEFC connections in and through the UN that should have been identified in the audit that Guterres corruptly refused to begin, with his conflict of interest. (Even his predecessor Ban Ki-moon ordered an audit after Ng Lap Seng was indicted - Guterres still hasn't after Patrick Ho was convicted.)
It's time to consider the Guterres-like hypocrisy of Gulbenkian, publicly tying itself to the "blue ocean economy" while taking money from the oil company Partex they tried to sell to CEFC which Guterres has covered up for. Antonio Guterres was a paid board member of Gulbenkian; his wife Catarina Vaz Pinto was paid by them as well. Antonio Guterres' daughter Mariana Guterres actively promotes Gulbenkian (as well as, troublingly, dead children in Kenya); his daughter in law Vanda Onnesjo Lobo gushes about its causes.
In fact, Gulbenkian which tried to sell its Partex Oil to CEFC in 2018 partners with "Oceano Azul Foundation" - which just happens to have in 2018 hired Antonio Guterres' daughter in law Vanda Lobo, see here. Given Gunbenkian's business dealings with UN briber CEFC, shouldn't this all have been disclosed? Isn't it an abuse that Antonio Guterres would have the only media asking about it roughed up and banned? This is UN corruption.
(His son Pedro Guimarães e Melo De Oliveira Guterres, after being a part of the defrauding of PT Portugal as it was passed from Brazil's Oito France's Altice, seems to have gone to ground, with not a single legitimate question about his business links answered). But now in 2018 - and according to Guterres' publicly funded propaganda, 2019 - it is all a front. Guterres has shown himself willing to rough up a journalist who asked about this and more,banning the Press for 182 days with no end in sight.
Consider Guterres' lead spokesman Stephane Dujarric has family links to Gulbenkian. Inner City Press asked Dujarric in writing to disclose these (no answer, and Stephane Dujarric blocks@InnerCityPress on Twitter), just as it askedhim in person why CEFC wasn't being audited in March 2018, before Dujarric and Guterres had Inner City Press roughed up and banned, 180 days now. In March 2018 Gulbenkian Foundation was actively trying to sell its Partex Oil and Gas affiliate to CEFC China Energy. And here's Stephane Dujarric's Tokyo- and Temple-based brother Robert Dujarric praising and appearing at Gulbenkian - audio here, program here. We'll have more on this.
One of the people identified in the Ban Ki-moon audit of Ng Lap Seng and South South News was Ion Botnaru. He was allowed to retire, after changing a UN General Assembly document along with then President of the General Assembly John Ashe, who died under indictment ostensibly crushed by his own barbell, to benefit Ng's Sun Kian Ip group. Botnaru reappears again with CEFC, here. And, crying out for audit, the President of the General Assembly who swore in Guterres, Peter Thomson of Fiji, traveled like Ashe and Vuk Jeremic and Sam Kutesa to meet CEFC's Ye Jianming in Hong Kong.
Inner City Press has asked Guterres and his spokespeople, among many other questions, "Beyond the 37 questions from Inner City Press you refused to answer last week, still set forth below for promised answer, this is a request, given that Peter Thomson is the SG's rep on Oceans that you describe in detail Thomson's 2017 meeting with now disappeared Ye Jianming of CEFC, name which UN DSS officials were with him and what reports they filed, what their duties were; what was seen by those accompanying Thomson, at least two of whom are still in the UN (one is with China)."
Typically, Guterres and his spokespeople did not answer. So here, pending listing those from UN Department of Safety and Security the group which roughs up the Press without accountability and maintains a retaliatory "lifetime" banned from the UN list, are the names: "During his two-day visit, the President of the UN General Assembly was accompanied by his senior advisors Abdelghani Merabet, and Zhang Yi, as well as by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’s Director of the Division for Sustainable Development, Zhu Juwang." Now, Thomson staffer or embed Zhang Yi has gone (back, or more openly) to working for the Chinese government: "On August 14 [2018], Deputy Director-General of China International Center for Economic and Technical Exchanges Zhang Yi was invited to attend the FOCAC - Africa-China Poverty Reduction and Development Conference, an important sub-forum under the FOCAC hosted by the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development and co-organized by the International Poverty Reduction Center in China and the China Belt and Road Institute for Agricultural Cooperation of China Agriculture University. Attending were more than 300 participants including government officials, international organizations’ representatives, non-governmental organizations’ officials, business leaders, experts and scholars from China, United States, Japan, Denmark and 40 African countries like Angola, Botswana and Mauritius."
What did they see during Thomson's meeting with now-known briber Ye Jianming? Zhu Juwang is still with UN DESA; Abdelghani Merabet is with the current PGA. We'll have more on this: the UN should be answering these questions, now.
In 2017, the year in which CEFC's Patrick Ho was indicted and arrested for UN bribery, CEFC in the UN engaged at least twice with Lenni Montiel, including for example on 6 July 2017, and also with DESA official Pingfan Hong. Some photos here. Inner City Press before Guterres had it roughed up and banned now 176 days for its inquiries into Guterres' corruption has politely questioned both Montiel and Hong - but Guterres has made that impossible and his Spokesmen refused to answer any written questions, for more than a week now. There are more connections.
Guterres got favors from Peter Thomson when Thomson was President of the General Assembly. Rudimentary open source research - including on the UN's own website here - finds that Thomson, like implicated Sam Kutesa and John Ashe and Vuk Jeremic, visited CEFC's Ye Jianming in Hong Kong. What was discussed? Inner City Press previously covered, critically but civilly, Thomson. Now corrupt Guterres has had Inner City Press roughed up and banned 280 days, with his Spokesman Stephane Dujarric refusing to answer any questions despite the promise of Guterres' USG Alison Smale.
