Inner City Press -- Investigative Reporting From the Inner City to Wall Street to the United Nations

UN's Fernandez-Taranco Said to Work on Malvinas Over Maldives

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, February 13, updated -- After Argentina's big day at the UN on February 10, handing its Malvinas Islands complaint to the President of the Security Council and telling the Press that the UK must respond, multiple well placed whistleblowing sources in the UN's Department of Political Affairs contacted Inner City Press.

They described a process by which Italo-Argentine Assistant Secretary General Oscar Fernandez-Taranco had been spending more and more of his UN-compensated time on the Malvinas / Falkland Island Issues so important to his native Argentina.

But Fernandez-Taranco's job at the UN is mostly about the Middle East, and currently the Maldives. So the whistleblowers asked, how is it appropriate that a high UN official spend his time and the prestige of his office on his own country's preoccupation?

  Even if "the Americas" is in his portfolio, the whistleblowers ask, how is it appropriate for a UN official to use his position to work on his own country?

(Others, feeling that Fernandez-Taranco is hardly expert in the Middle East, said it was a blessing in disguise that he was "otherwise occupied").

One high placed source told Inner City Press, "you mused about how an appointment of Argentine Susan Malcorra as Deputy Secretary General over Migiro might impact this issues, how she might interact with the UK's Lyall Grant -- but the real irony is the the UK's Mark Malloch-Brown was a reference for Fernandez-Taranco, who now uses the job he got to move for Malvinas over Falklands."

(c) UN Photo
Taranco & Migiro, who's to be replaced by another Argentine, Malcorra

Ironic indeed.

 Meanwhile, while Fernandez Taranco mostly backed up the coup leader while in Maldives, that country's long time Permanent Representative to the UN Abdul Ghafoor Mohamed scheduled a press conference for 11:30 am.

  The buzz, well placed sources told Inner City Press, was that he would resign or defect from the new coup leader(s), or "pull a Shalgam" in UN-ese, a reference to Gaddafi's longtime representative Shalgam who switched sides year. But barely an hour later, this press conference was cancelled. One asked, Lost his nerve? We'll see.