Nice work

The taxpayer is being stung so this Lord can live in Admiralty House

Wednesday, 7th November 2007

Mark Malloch-Brown, the minister for Africa, Asia and the UN, was the most prestigious recruit to Gordon Brown’s ministry of all the talents. But this appointment might be about to come back and embarrass the Prime Minister with controversy brewing over the former UN deputy secretary-general’s taxpayer funded accommodation.

The relationship between the UNDP and Soros remains obscure. The UN last year was unable or unwilling to supply a complete list of details accounting for this relationship; neither did Soros’s Open Society Institute open up about it. But Malloch Brown and Soros were sufficiently close professionally to give a joint press conference on 19 March 2002 at a global aid gathering in Monterrey, Mexico.

Nor did Malloch Brown ever disclose his finances to the public — despite presiding over reforms that he assured the world would mean more transparency. In 2005, Malloch Brown told the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations that ‘transparency and accountability are the watchwords for the United Nations in the new century’ and described ‘more rigorous financial disclosures by senior officials’ as an immediate management reform that the UN was already undertaking. In 2006, the UN Secretariat launched a reform requiring senior UN administrative officials to fill out financial disclosure forms and file them with the UN’s new Ethics Office. But this ‘financial disclosure’ policy came with an extraordinary loophole of which Kafka would have been proud: the forms did not actually need to be disclosed to the public. This year, Ban Ki-moon, Kofi Annan’s successor, and his deputy both voluntarily released their financial forms to the public. But despite much talk about transparency, neither Annan nor Malloch Brown chose to release theirs.

The connection with Soros became ever closer once Malloch Brown left the UN. Malloch Brown was appointed to senior positions at both Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Institute, which promotes democracy and the rule of law and which Soros founded and of which he remains the chairman. The Wall Street Journal cheekily dubbed Malloch Brown part of an ‘axis of Soros’.

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carol scott

November 11th, 2007 12:18am Report this comment

Gordon Brown does not ever admit mistakes.

Maggie Black

November 13th, 2007 6:48pm Report this comment

David Lorraine is right. Malloch Brown is exceptional, and people who have worked with him at the UN have the greatest respect for him, even when they have not been personally well-served by his reforms and cost cutting decisions and have been bruised by some encounters. The idea that he would describe himself as doing God's work is preposterous, but I can well imagine that he would find a journalist only interested in a story about 'scandal and perks for top UN officials', when there are so many major problems in the world to address and so many difficulties in doing so, infuriating and a complete waste of his time. And now he's here, after 25 odd years in the interantional system, almost all of it at very high level. That's very good for us, and for others in the world. So he hasn't worked within the British political system before, and that is bound to mean some toes are trodden on and nuances missed. It is one of the anomalies of our House of Lords system that someone can be appointed to senior office in that way. Because he comes from outside the Westminster village, is it really necessary to write loaded sneers against him? It sounds as though insiders at Westminster, including journalists, are just determined to carp at someone who is not 'one of us', in a familiar phrase.

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