UN GATE, July 15 – The Office for South-South Cooperation (OSSC) is well known for being the most corrupt office in UNDP, with its notorious history spanning nearly two decades. In 2015, a colossal bribery scandal led the FBI to the arrest and subsequent prosecution of Chinese billionaire Ng Lap Seng and former President of the UN General Assembly John Ashe.
At the time, OSSC was identified as the main vehicle for this elaborate bribery scheme, which aimed to permanently relocate the Global South-South Development Expo to a conference center in Macau, built by Mr. Ng’s construction company Sun Kian Ip Group (SKIG). The extent of OSSC’s involvement also included organizing a South-South development forum in Macau co-sponsored by SKIG, when participants including Member States’ delegates and UN staff received free iPads. SKIG also contributed $1.5 million to OSSC for implementing projects, as well as promised a $15 million contribution to OSSC over 3 years. Amid the public exposure and news reports on this scandal, UNDP management tried to salvage its reputation by ordering an internal audit into OSSC in late 2015, led by UNDP Office of Audit and Investigation (OAI). As it turned out, OAI uncovered that OSSC’s involvement in the SKIG scandal was only the tip of the iceberg as the audit found mounting evidence of OSSC’s gross financial mismanagement, decade-long bribery of the G77, numerous recruitment scams, among many other issues.
Among the three available audit ratings “satisfactory”, “partially satisfactory”, and “unsatisfactory”, the audit resulted in an “unsatisfactory” rating for OSSC, which indicated that “internal controls, governance and risk management processes were either not established or not functioning well.” The audit further noted “the issues were such that the achievement of the overall objectives of the audited entity could be seriously compromised.”
As the audit’s findings appeared particularly damning for OSSC and UNDP’s oversight of OSSC, the draft audit report underwent enormous political meddling. OSSC Director Jorge Chediek and OAI Director Helge Osttveiten colluded to influence the outcomes of this audit in 2016. Mr. Osttveiten shared the draft audit report with both Mr. Chediek and the G77 Executive Secretary, Mourad Ahmia, despite the apparent conflict of interest. As a result, specific details pertaining to corrupt activities that were in the interest of Mr. Chediek and Mr. Ahmia were significantly watered down in the final audit report, including: Texts indicating that OSSC’s work was “influenced” by the G77 were subsequently changed to “guided”. Names of activities indicating ties with China and the G77 were replaced by the project numbers to obscure these ties.
References to the G77 were replaced by the assuming word “the Entity” to obscure the relationship with G77, particularly Mr. Ahmia, whose salary has been financed by UNDP through OSSC despite not being a UN staff/personnel.
The channeling of UNDP resources through UNOPS using the secondment mechanism to fraudulently promote 2 individuals, the G77 Executive Secretary Mr. Ahmia and OSSC staff Francisco Simplicio, effectively bypassing the standard UNDP competitive recruitment process. Texts detailing waste related to excessive and expensive travels by OSSC personnel were largely removed or obscured. ICP has reported extensively on the excessive travels of UNDP management, including OSSC employees such as Mr. Chediek who has gone to rack up almost $500,000 in travel expenses over the past 5 years. Mr. Chediek remains one of the most traveled UN employees, outranking even heads of other UN agencies. Inner City Press now has copies of the draft and final audit reports showing how damaging texts were edited in tracked changes by Mr. Chediek and Mr. Ahmia, to blatantly manipulate the audit outcomes in 2016. They will be put on DocumentCloud.
The subsequent follow-up audit report released in 2017, also signed off by Mr. Osttveiten, certified that recommendations contained in the 2016 audit report have been “fully implemented” by OSSC. In reality, none of the recommendations were implemented and the audit proved to be a bogus attempt to clear UNDP and OSSC’s name from the public scandal.
Since 2016, Mr. Chediek oversaw OSSC’s downward spiral of rampant abuse and corruption, which included continuous financial mismanagement, bribery, fraud, and numerous misconduct. Mr. Chediek solicited the services of Ines Tofalo, who was recruited to work at OSSC in 2010 as the Programme Finance Specialist, to act as his right-hand woman and advisor. A fellow Argentinian, Ms. Tofalo was entrusted by Mr. Chediek with outsized influence and authority in exchange for excess remuneration and compensation, including a speedy promotion to Chief of the newly created Programme Support Unit, for which Ms. Tofalo proposed and wrote the TOR herself. Ms. Tofalo then took on the responsibilities of overseeing the disbursement and allocation of program resources, and overall financial management for OSSC, despite being implicated in the financial mismanagement issues uncovered by the audit.
Audio here.
In essence and typical of UNDP’s malfeasance, the very person responsible for a failed audit is promoted to do just that again. After the audit, Mr. Chediek and Ms. Tofalo totally discarded the audit recommendations, and instead colluded to establish a new OSSC organizational structure that employed personnel based on cronyism and nepotism, all of whom further perpetuated the systemic corruption and cover-up at a more extensive level. Mr. Chediek and Ms. Tofalo were determined to continue using UNDP allocated resources to bribe high-level officials and buy political favors to advance Mr. Chediek’s ultimate goal of acquiring a UN Assistant Secretary General (ASG) position. OSSC receives allocated resources from UNDP including $3.5 millions annually for programmatic activities and another $3.5 millions to cover other overhead costs. These allocated resources come from voluntary contributions made to UNDP by Member States, including major donors such as the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Australia and several European countries. Mr. Chediek is not shy about syphoning millions of dollars of these Member States’ contributions, while Ms. Tofalo frequently and publicly advocates his political agenda.
Inner City Press now has voice audio of Ms. Tofalo describing her and Mr. Chediek’s secret dealings with the G77 “part of the deal we’ve been having with the countries of the G77 is that we are doing a lot of services for you and you have our back. This office has its budget protected and every time it goes to the Executive Board, this is the conclusion that the countries come up with. We do a lot of services for them and they defend our budgets”, “this conversation if it’s leaked to OECD countries, they don’t like it”, “Jorge was dying to do this, he’s interested in some of this for political reason”.
This Argentine Bonnie and Clyde duo has flaunted their charade for half a decade now, confident that the high-level officials lining their pockets would not speak up and would help them evade UNDP’s justice. Mr. Chediek and Ms. Tofalo have laughed about having UN-granted immunity to take on any Member States’ legal systems to hold them accountable for the gross mismanagement of global tax-payers’ money. This arrogance is certainly not baseless, as history recently repeated when they were “exonerated” (in Mr. Chediek’s words) after a two year OAI investigation into OSSC for fraud, waste, mismanagement, abuse and harassment from 2018 to 2020.
Similar to the 2015 audit, OAI Director Mr. Osttveiten as the prosecutor shared details and progress of the investigation with Mr. Chediek on a regular basis, effectively compromising and undermining his own office. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that when the investigation was close to conclusion, UNDP Associate Administrator, Mourad Wahba, served as the judge and personally decided to exonerate Mr. Chediek and Ms. Tofalo from all wrongdoings. This is in no way proof of their innocence but rather a compensation by Mr. Wahba, an Egyptian national, who previously used OSSC as the money laundering vehicle to transfer UNDP resources to the Permanent Mission of Egypt when Egypt served as the Chair of G77.
The OSSC case is emblematic of how the spread of UNDP corruption continues unabated. With anything related to OSSC, UNDP has taken impunity and protection of corruption to a whole new level, allowing Mr. Chediek and Ms. Tofalo to get off scotch free with their second exonerations in less than five years and proving that UN anti-corruption and reform exist in name only. The impunity perpetuated by UNDP management ensures that bad actors like Mr. Chediek and Ms. Tofalo continue undeterred. The evidence against Mr. Chediek and Ms. Tofalo is overwhelming, there is no doubt about that.
But perhaps UNDP is mostly concerned about airing its dirty laundry to the world and protecting its pocket. What is particularly concerning is at OSSC, Ms. Tofalo now continues to assume sole authority and responsibilities in managing millions of dollars of UNDP resources, as well as other partners’ funds, most notably the India-UN Development Partnership Fund with $150 million of a developing country’s (India) contributions in the hands of a UN crook.
Word on the street is that crooked Mr. Chediek is celebrating his “exoneration” while devising new schemes to game OECD countries in order to gather the resources to bribe his way up to the UN ASG position that he so longs for.
And while corrupt UNDP officials like Mr. Chediek and Ms. Tofalo profited, cash strapped nations impacted economically by the pandemic continue to bankroll career criminals disguised as UN officials.
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