The departing head of the United Nations agency that battles internal corruption issued a scathing assessment of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki- Moon’s record on accountability, fueling criticism from Washington and defensive remarks from Ban’s spokesman Tuesday.
In a confidential memo to Ban obtained by The Associated Press, outgoing Undersecretary-General Inga-Britt Ahlenius accused Ban of systematically undermining her authority and weakening the U.N.’s oversight functions so much that it is becoming irrelevant.
“There is no transparency; there is lack of accountability,” Ahlenius said in her end-of-assignment report to Ban after five years as head of the U.N.’s Office of Internal Oversight Services. The office, set up in 1994, is supposed to operate independently and has three main divisions for investigations, audits and inspections.
“Rather than supporting the internal oversight which is the sign of strong leadership and good governance, you have strived to control it, which is to undermine its position,” the former Swedish auditor general wrote to Ban. “I regret to say that the Secretariat is now in a process of decay. It is not only falling apart . . . it is drifting into irrelevance.”
Ban’s chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, said that “many pertinent facts were overlooked or misrepresented” in Ahlenius’ memo.
“This secretary-general, like his recent predecessors, has had to strike a balance between acting as a chief administrative officer of the United Nations on the one hand and providing truly global leadership on the other,” Nambiar wrote in a document prepared in response to a Washington Post story and later released to AP by Ban’s office.
U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Tuesday that Ban has made improvements in the U.N.’s accountability since 2007, when he “came into office with precisely that aim, to strengthen accountability and transparency.”
But, he added, Ban “would be the first to say this organization has a long way to go to fully implement the changes that are needed. And it’s precisely in that context that . . . we’re studying closely this end-of-assignment report.”
