U.N. Agency Provided $2.3M Worth of Equipment for Venezuela — Or Did It?
By George Russell
Fox News Story
April 1, 2008
Why did the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) buy $2,375,000 worth of walk-through airport body scanners for the radical leftist Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez? Or did the agency purchase the high-tech equipment at all? And if not, what happened to the $2.3 million?
According to UNDP, not only did the 2007 purchase take place, it was arranged in order to ensure “objectivity, transparency, efficiency” of the procurement in a country that, under Chavez, supports terrorists in neighboring Colombia and has aligned itself with sponsors of international terror such as Iran and Cuba.
According to UNDP spokesman David Morrison, the contract was awarded by UNDP on behalf of Venezuela’s national customs and taxation authority, after a free and open competition that guaranteed fairness and openness in the deal.
But according to UNDP internal documents examined by FOX News, things didn’t quite happen that way. In the confidential minutes of UNDP’s top headquarters procurement committee, the contract was awarded to a Venezuelan firm named Setronix C.A., without competitive bidding. The same waiver of competition is also cited in internal UNDP procurement records that finalized the transaction.
The highly reputable U.S. defense contracting firm that manufactured the 19 ProVision scanners procured by UNDP, L3 Communications, says that the only shipment of scanning machines it sent to Venezuela under UNDP auspices last year was for the country’s correctional system. A company spokesman said the firm had no information to add about any other Venezuela procurement involving UNDP.
Since March 20, when FOX News first began asking questions about the deal, UNDP has hastily begun publishing an electronic “paper trail” that apparently aims to justify the purchase that may or may not have taken place the way the UNDP says it did — if it took place at all.
The focus of concern is a contract known in UNDP’s financial system as RBLAC/07/066, covering the $2.3 million scanner purchase. UNDP asserts that it did absolutely nothing wrong in the way it handled the deal. In defense of that assertion, a UNDP spokesman in New York referred FOX to a page on the website of UNDP’s Venezuela regional office, which describes a joint UNDP-Venezuela Project #58054, “support for the consolidation of the modernization of the customs system.”
The Venezuelan regional website page only appeared shortly after midnight on March 24, 2008 — four days after FOX News began sending questions to UNDP headquarters about the deal. And the document embedded in the page refers to a $70.7 million modernization of the customs process that extends from October 2007 to September 2009 — months after contract RBLAC/07/066 was completed.
Beyond the scanner deal are serious issues about the intimate relationship between UNDP, the United Nations’ premier development agency, and governments like the Chavez regime, which pursues an aggressively anti-American global strategy and has forged alliances with the Castro regime in Cuba and radical Islamist Iran to pursue those objectives.
Along the way, according to knowledgeable critics of the Chavez government, the regime has siphoned off billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil revenues to line the pockets of Venezuela’s militarized ruling elite and further its aggressive agenda.
“Everyone knows that Venezuela has had historically high levels of corruption,” says Gustavo Coronel, the former Venezuelan head of Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog organization, who now writes from Virginia about Venezuela’s ugly finances. “But we are now seeing something we have never seen before.”
(On the most recent Transparency International worldwide survey of business perceptions of corruption, Venezuela ranks close to the worst end of the scale, 141st out of 163 countries, barely ahead of Nigeria and Turkmenistan.)
It was precisely to combat possibilities of self-dealing and dishonesty, according to UNDP spokesman Morrison, that the anti-poverty organization took part in a “fully competitive” bidding exercise, open to “all companies around the world,” in order to purchase the U.S.-made airport scanners.
“UNDP participation in such processes helps to ensure competitiveness, objectivity, transparency, efficiency, wide international reach, and, ultimately, value for money,” he told FOX News.
Morrison said that UNDP’s involvement was included in its approved program for Venezuela, under a mandate to “improve capacity of the public sector to manage and to provide public services.” “There was no waiver of competitive bidding,” he also insisted.
But confidential UNDP internal documents obtained by FOX News say otherwise.
These include the minutes of a top level UNDP committee known as the headquarters Advisory Committee on Procurement (ACP), chaired by UNDP Assistant Secretary General Akiko Yuge, who is also head of UNDP’s Bureau of Management and its Chief Procurement Officer (CPO).
The minutes obtained by FOX News state that on March 16, 2007, the local Venezuelan branch of UNDP requested just such a waiver of competitive bidding (“solicitude de exception a un proceso competitivo”) on contract RBLAC/07/066, for the “acquisition of non-intrusive inspection equipment for human beings (passengers and those in transit).” The procurement was done on behalf of the Venezuelan customs revenue and taxation service, a branch of the Venezuelan Finance Ministry known as SENIAT.
