A Mystery Erupts At United Nations Over Greece's Cash

By BENNY AVNI, Staff Reporter of the Sun

UNITED NATIONS — After sinking millions of dollars into a failed joint project with the United Nations, the government of Greece is asking where its money went.

The country supplied $5 million for the U.N. Thessaloniki Center for Public Service Professionalism, which was established to promote the use of electronic publications in creating good government practices in the Balkans and former Soviet republics. But the outgoing U.N. undersecretary-general for management, Christopher Burnham, said in a letter to the Greek interior minister, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, that taxpayer funds Athens entrusted to the United Nations were misused and mismanaged.

Now the Greek government is seeking to retrieve whatever funds are left from officials with the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which managed the center.

Launched in 1999, the Greece-based project, known as UNTC, was designed to instill such ideals as transparency and accountability in government bureaucrats from emerging Central European democracies.

When asked what, if anything, UNTC has produced in its seven years of existence, a source who has followed it from its inception formed a circle with his hand.

"Zero, zilch," he said, adding that Italian U.N. officials used up the project's resources as part of Italy's struggle with Greece over influence in the Balkans. The source, who requested anonymity, specifically cited the U.N.-based Italian official who oversaw the project, a DESA director named Guido Bertucci.

For the Thessaloniki project, "things started well," its Greek former manager, Panos Liverakos, told The New York Sun yesterday.

But in 2002, the United Nations launched through DESA a project to compete with the Greek-funded UNTC. The Center for Administrative Information in the Euro-Mediterranean Region was funded by the Italian government and based in Naples.

"Then another center opened with Italian funds, CAIMED, and the director of DESA started neglecting — or shall I use a stronger word, sabotaging" — the Greek project, Mr. Liverakos said. Instead, DESA promoted its Italian competitor, he said.

Mr. Bertucci was traveling yesterday and unavailable for comment. A U.N. spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said the United Nations would have no official comment prior to the completion of an internal audit, which is "in the process of being conducted." Once finalized, the audit will be shared with Athens, he said.

The U.N. internal watchdog, the Office of Internal Oversight Services, has already completed several audits of the Thessaloniki project, and last spring a decision was made to shut the project down. Still, Greek Interior Ministry officials say some of their investment remains unaccounted for.

Mr. Burnham wrote Mr. Pavlopoulos on November 9 that he hoped a final OIOS audit of the project would help Turtle Bay correct its "management failures." He also wrote that he hoped the U.N. audit would "provide your government with the ability to pursue accountability for the misuse or mismanagement of resources entrusted by your government to the United Nations."

While the United Nations has not supplied any official numbers, sources close to the project estimate that $800,000 is left in UNTC's coffers and that the United Nations could owe Athens another $650,000, which DESA charged as a management fee.

Mr. Burnham's tenure at Turtle Bay ends today, and some in Athens have voiced concerns that with his departure, officials at DESA and other U.N. offices could find a way to drag out the audit and the return of the funds.

According to correspondence between officials in Athens and several U.N. agencies, all sides agreed to shut down the project by March 31. "Nine months later, the center's premises" are still open, at a cost to Greek taxpayers of $16,000 a month, the Greek Interior Ministry's point man on the project, Vassilios Andronopoulos, wrote to Mr. Bertucci in a September 18 letter.

A DESA official who spoke on condition of anonymity, however, said yesterday that the project has yet to wind down. The Greek government is entitled to receive "any residual funds" that might remain "after the project's liquidation," the official added.

The former project manager, Mr. Liverakos, who currently works in the Balkans for a separate U.N. agency, was fired by Mr. Bertucci, as were several other Greek officials on the project. Greek officials said the firings were an attempt to deplete the project's resources by using its funds to hire personnel loyal to DESA.

Although the DESA official told the Sun yesterday that the agency's Thessaloniki and Naples operations are "totally different projects," a quick glance at their Web sites shows that they promote similar goals and operate in the same region. The DESA official said the agency had hired all personnel according to U.N. rules, and he expressed confidence that the final OIOS audit would prove that UNTC was well-managed.

But according to a September 19 draft of the OIOS report, "the audit revealed serious weaknesses in DESA's management of the project."