In April 2009, he [Ashe] was elected chair of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP), and was responsible for overseeing negotiations leading up to and including the final phase at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.Shocked! Shocked! Former Head of UN General Assembly Charged in $1.3 Million Bribery Scheme | The Rosett Report
By Claudia Rosett On October 8, 2015
In the grand casino of UN corruption cases, here we go again. This time the news is the arrest on Tuesday, in Dobbs Ferry, New York, of a former president of the United Nations General Assembly, John W. Ashe. Along with five others, Ashe, who also served for years as ambassador to
the UN for the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda, has been charged in the Southern District of New York with taking part in a $1.3 million bribery scheme.
Allegedly, the scheme entailed bribing Ashe himself. According to the U.S. Attorney’s press release [1], all six defendants “were charged in connection with a multi-year scheme to pay more than $1.3 million in bribes to ASHE in exchange for official actions in his capacity as UNGA President and Antiguan government official in support of Chinese business interests.”
Though that summary hardly does justice to the saga detailed in the criminal complaint. [2] Among the other five defendants is a former frequent visitor to the Clinton White House, Ng Lap Seng, a.k.a. David Ng, a Macau real estate tycoon [3] who figured in some heated controversies [4] of the late 1990s. In this latest incarnation, as described in the complaint, it appears Ng was “seeking to build a multi-billion dollar, UN-sponsored conference center in Macau, China.” As the Southern District press release details, Ng was arrested last month along with another of the defendants, Jeff C. Yin, “based on a separate complaint alleging that NG and YIN agreed to make false statements to Customs and Border Protection officers about the true purpose of approximately $4.5 million in cash that NG and YIN had brought into the U.S. from China since 2013.”
A note on that: I have covered enough UN corruption cases to be able to tell you that cash is a big element in many of them. Bags of cash, envelopes of cash, bricks of cash, cash in pockets, cash in suitcases, cash on hotel bedspreads. At one point during a court case related to the UN’s Iraq Oil-for Food scandal, there was a story told on the stand by a government witness of a fellow smuggling hundreds of thousands in $100 bills — gift of Saddam — into the U.S. by way of stuffing the loot into his socks, pants and underwear.
-go to links-
No comments:
Post a Comment