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UNESCO Corruption of Azoulay As Altnoder Forgets Passport Kassianides Lives Large in Paris

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive, more here

UNITED NATIONS GATE, May 26 – Political rot plagues UNESCO less than two years after the election of the French Director-General Audrey Azoulay. Her Director of Cabinet, Nicolas Kassianides was granted illegal allocations for renting a lavish five bedroom flat at the heart of the most expensive area in Paris. It resulted in tens of thousands dollars spent by UNESCO for paying him rent allocations to which he is not entitled as he was appointed under his French nationality. More on Patreon.

The same concerns the first class travels of Kassianides, in addition to the personal car put at his disposal by UNESCO against all rules.

  Such corruption schemes are keenly validated by the Director Human Resources Hong Kwon, well known also as promoter of essentially modern slavery – his personal assistant from the Philippines is cooking and cleaning every week the house of Director HRM for free, which is against all rules and principles of the organization promoting human rights and gender balance.  [It echoes the human traffic in New York City of Antonio Guterres good friends the Qatari royals, reported on by Inner City Press in exile at the SDNY court, here.]

The Cabinet of Azoulay is a bunch of amateurs - an advisor to Azoulay who resigned recently mixed in an official correspondence the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Oops!

  Even more ridiculous, the main adviser to the DG Azoulay for culture and communication, Sunna Altnoder, forgot her passport at home while traveling on official mission for UNESCO to Abidjan, missing thus the flight with her boss and then arrived late even for the second flight booked by UNESCO for her first class trip, provoking huge costs to UNESCO of some additional 10,000 euros paid for air-tickets for no reason other than her amateurish behavior.   Will she pay it back?

Another very serious case recently covered up by the administration of Azoulay, concerns the misuse of taxpayers money in large proportions. Take that example - the financial services of Azoulay authorized a payment of some 450,000 US dollars to an unknown financial institution in London. After effecting the payment, those funds simply vanished in someone’s pocket. Still, no accountability, no reaction, no measures to recover the money by the corrupted UNESCO.

At the bureaucratic level, in April the Executive Board rejected her draft program and budget for the next biennium until its autumn session; the proposal by Azoulay strategic transformation is in limbo.  Worse chaos is caused by incompetent senior appointees and by the Cabinet of Azoulay, composed mainly by French administrators with little knowledge of multilateral UN work.

  It begun with the weakening of the program sectors and the wiping out of the so-called expertise hubs within UNESCO, and was then complemented by a lack of accountability by senior managers that led to anarchy and favorable environment for pursuing naked self-interests. In a very short period, the UNESCO system atomized. Unruliness became the new normal in dealing with major issues both within and outside the Organization. 

  A senior official told Inner City Press,The third constitutional amendment, proposed by Qatar few days ago, to have the next Director-General elected by the General Conference instead of by the Executive Board, is well accepted by the member states but not by France, as they consider it directed against Azoulay’s desired re-election. [Mirroring Antonio Guterres mad desire for a second even more rotten term.] Actually, this is quite inaccurate, but says a lot about the febrility of Azoulay’s administration." An erudite senior official, needless to say, befitting UNESCO.

     An ambassador from group one snarked: "The French clearly have an agenda to reduce the scope and the impact of UNESCO in the future. The links between the leaver(s) and Azoulays both pere et fille are well known in our capitals." More on this on Patreon, here.

The Azoulay administration is indeed all but leading by example toward the bottom.

The staff unions are appalled by such a lack of internal control and that there are - again -, no sanctions whatsoever even in such serious case of embezzlement.  Still banned Inner City Press will have more on that.

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