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By Matthew Russell Lee & sources, Exclusive

UN GATE, July 30 – Inner City Press has been reporting on serious malfeasance by the French Audrey Azoulay administration at UNESCO in Paris, almost as bad as Antonio Guterres' corruption in and of the UN in New York. Almost - a fish rots from the head.

UNESCO, like the whole UN system under Antonio Guterres is falling apart into abyssal nonsense and corruption. UNESCO staff are feeling the heat of abuse of power every day, and fortunately, some of them are beginning to reveal more unpleasant facts about DG Azoulay and her administration, despite the totalitarian regime's style and methods of persecution at the agency through the servile Admin and IOS departments.  

  The most recent major failure of DG Azoulay is her aborted trip to Kiev that was supposed to take place this week.

On Tuesday the 26th, she proudly announced to some ambassadors that she would be going to Kiev the next day for a series of important meetings with President Zelensky and the ministers responsible for relations with UNESCO.

Then, for reasons of French domestic politics, she was abruptly stopped by her French bosses at the Quai d'Orsay, and the official visit of a UN agency head was canceled a few hours before she was to board the plane to Kiev. "What is surprising is that there are still people who are surprised by this total obedience of Azoulay.

At UNESCO, everyone knows very well that she is just a puppet in the hands of the French authorities. She is not an independent and decisive director general, but simply a weathercock who turns according to the direction in which the French wind blows," said an internal source.  

The trouble for the Ukrainian authorities is that this is a totally disrespectful political move and above all, no new date has been set according to the usual protocol. So, putting Ukraine on the front page of the UNESCO website is the most Azoulay can do for the moment. 

As far as protocol is concerned, UNESCO has a new chief of protocol services, Ricardo de Guimaraes Pinto, who was the former chief of cabinet of DG Azoulay.

He had to be removed because of Azoulay's decision to hand back the position to the Frenchman Flavio Bonetti. About the ‘achievements’ of Bonetti see here and here

  Exfiltrated last year from UNESCO to the office of French Interior Minister Darmanin, Bonetti was accused of several major errors in security management at UNESCO.

But since no member state complained or demanded accountability, and given that his salary at UNESCO is three times what he earned at the Interior Ministry, Bonetti begged Azoulay to take him back and she did.

 The game of musical chairs was then set up to free up the same position for him. Ricardo Pinto was promptly removed and Flavio Bonetti immediately took his old job without going through a normal recruitment process, as the rules state, but again, no one in HR or IOS objected. 

The loser in this game was the former chief of protocol, Michel Toto, who was decentralized without delay to head the UNESCO office in Tanzania. The fact that he had never dealt with program issues in his life was not considered important by Azoulay.

Thus, Toto will now manage a program office without having a single day of experience in this field. An additional difficulty in understanding this decision by UNESCO management is that Toto speaks neither English nor Swahili. The agency will have to digest this latest aberration of the French DG which systematically undermines its work. 

Right after his appointment, again without a due recruitment process as required by the rules, Ricardo Pinto was tasked by Azoulay with bringing UNESCO's protocol closer to that of the Quai d'Orsay by possibly appointing a French national in the coming months to manage UNESCO's related protocol work. This reflects her constant efforts to increase French grip by strangling all aspects of the organization's operations.

Those who know Ricardo Pinto have a sympathetic pity for him because he is simply not cut out for this job. “He will suffer more than anything else”, said one of his former colleagues in New York.

“Ricardo is an intrinsically good guy who is given a bad cop role. It will never work out well for him”, he added. And the mistakes were not long in coming. One of Ricardo Pinto's recent "exploits" was his failure to invite the General conference President and the Executive board Chair to the closing session and final group photo of the Transforming Education Pre‐Summit that was held in Paris, at UNESCO Headquarters, on 28‐30 June 2022. Here  

Failing to ensure that the two most important people in UNESCO's diplomatic hierarchy - DG Azoulay comes only third - are duly invited to the closing of the high-level summit is normally a serious enough mistake that staff should be severely reprimanded, if not removed from the position.

This is not anymore the case, as both the President of the General conference, Santiago Irazabal Mourao of Brazil, and Tamara Rastovac Siamashvili of Serbia, did not protest.

So why shouldn't DG Azoulay and her protocol services continue to ignore them and openly humiliate them by undermining their constitutional authority and prerogatives! On the other hand, IOS and Legal affairs are getting along well with their usual tacit approval of all the French DG's misdeeds.

From our HR sources, we learn that the director of Legal affairs, Santiago Villalpando, is coercing Azoulay and trading his full support for her in exchange for his wife's appointment to UNESCO.

We will be following closely the development of this other major conflict of interest - a reward for impunity in breaking the rules - which deserves the full attention of member states.

 IOS is also to blame for failing to carry out all sexual and moral harassment investigations to their normal conclusions with charges. In collaboration with Azoulay's Cabinet, they are burying the files on cases of moral harassment and covering up several cases of sexual harassment of senior officials.

Two cases are particularly flagrant and concern senior African officials in the culture sector and in the external relation department.

They may nevertheless yield some results, as one director, previously based in North Africa, was dismissed for harassment a few months ago, only because he was close to retirement and had the opportunity to leave the agency without any charges being brought against him.   

  "Human Resources and IOS are shamefully covering up this administration's lack of respect for human dignity, especially for women," an insider told Inner City Press. “This is the result of blind obedience to even the silliest orders from the top, against any standard of integrity and respect for rules and procedures by international civil servants”.

Staff associations have voiced their concerns clearly of seeing alarming practices reemerging by the total absence of respect for rules and regulations.

They keep opposing the situation in which top senior managers can exert total control over the staff including by using intimidation and harassment that force staff members into fear and obedience.  This is where UNESCO stands today. We will have more on that. 

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