UN number two dismisses abuse of power claims

[emad]

Telegraph
By Charles Laurence in New York
(Filed: 17/07/2005)

Britain's most senior official at the United Nations claimed to be the victim of "character assassination" last night after staff urged a boycott of a reception celebrating his promotion to number two in the organisation.


UN official Mark Malloch Brown: 'This is just a ridiculous sideshow'
As chief of staff to Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General, Mark Malloch Brown is now to be considered the power behind the throne. But even as luminaries ranging from Bono, the U2 singer, to President Bill Clinton and Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State, heaped videogram accolades on Mr Malloch Brown at the party, "guerrillas" within the UN were mounting a bitter personal attack.

Writing anonymously on an internet weblog site, they accused Mr Malloch Brown, who is charged with reforming the scandal-plagued institution, of an "obsession with consolidating power" for himself and his "Democratic cronies" and of "riding roughshod" over regulations. He had a "reckless approach", they alleged, which "fits into a long-standing pattern of abuse and conflict of interest".

Mr Malloch Brown, the former head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday that the "scurrilous, politically motivated attacks" had come from "deserved victims of change". He has cut a flamboyant path through the UN since his promotion, which came at a sensitive time as the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal threatened to sideline the UN as a credible inter-national force.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=KXALI0KEBMX2XQFIQMGSM54AVCBQWJVC?xml=/news/2005/07/17/wun17.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/07/17/ixnewstop.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=31713