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UNDP Procurement: Curiouser and Curiouser

By George Russell

Fox News

April 18, 2008

The United Nations Development Program’s procurement of airport body scanners last year on behalf of the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela is generating controversy within U.N. Headquarters, as UNDP attempts to justify its actions.

On Thursday, UNDP posted a letter on its own web site from the scanners’ American manufacturer which ostensibly confirmed that the Venezuelan company which won UNDP’s procurement contract had purchased the scanners for UNDP’s project on August 30, 2007.

The problem is that the date and purchase order number cited in the letter do not match those in an official document from the same manufacturer that UNDP posted on its website two weeks ago. The older document, a notarized “certificate of origin” UNDP says was used to ship the equipment to Venezuela, asserts that the purchase was made on August 8, 2007 — three full weeks before the latest letter says the scanner purchase even existed.

Casting even more confusion into the case, a letter from the Venezuelan company, Setronix C.A., to FOX News cites another date for UNDP’s purchase order: August 1, 2007 — putting the alleged deal a full month earlier than the manufacturer now says it took place.

he same letter claims that the number of scanners involved in the order had dropped from 19 to 17 — despite UNDP’s previous confirmation of the higher number in communications with FOX — because the company had tacked on an expensive three-year service package onto the deal after UNDP approved the procurement.

Yet copies of confidential UNDP headquarters procurement documents obtained by FOX News, which waived competitive bidding on the procurement, specifically note that the 19-scanner deal already included such a three-year service package.

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