After
UN Sold Itself to Ng Lap Seng,
This Week Event With Guo
Xiangang, Macau Attendees
By Matthew
Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS,
August 21– After the UN was
exposed as having been bought
and corrupted by Macau-based
businessman Ng Lap Seng,
convicted less than a month
ago on six counts of UN
bribery, money laundering and
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
violations, what has changed?
While the
spokesmen for new Secretary
General Antonio Guterres evade
the questions
asked by Inner City Press, for
example about the UN rewarding
Ng for his South South News'
coverage of Ban Ki-moon's
Central America trip in 2015,
murky uses of the UN and its
building, movement inside
which Inner City Press is still
restricted for its
anti-corruption coverage,
continue.
For
example, on August 23-24 the
UN General Assembly Hall will
be taken over by an NGO named
“World Development Foundation”
headed by Guo Xiangang. Inner
City Press first reported on
this group in May
2016, noting that the UN
Department of Public
Information was partnering
with a group that at that time
did not even have a website.
This came after DPI's
then-chief Cristina Gallach
did no
due diligence of Ng Lap
Seng's purchase of events in
the UN lobby and even its
slavery memorial, then evicted
Inner City Press after it asked her about her links
to Ng's South South Awards.
But there are
photos of DPI officials with
Guo Xiangang. The cover, just
as Ng Lap Seng used the
Dominican Republic's Francis
Lorenzo and a number of other
states, in this case are
Suriname and Guyana, both of
whose Permanent
Representatives attended Ng
Lap Seng's Macau event in
August 2015 and were
interviewed by South South
News, here
and here.
This week in attendance will
be the Permanent
Representative of Dominca,
whose Prime Minister Roosevelt
Skerrit was the only head of
state who went to Ng Lap
Seng's Macau event, along with
the vice president of the
United Nations Correspondents
Association.
As Inner City
Press reported and pursued,
the UN Correspondents
Association took payment from
Ng' South South News for full
page ads, then provided the
venue for Ng's and Vivian
Wang's photo op with Ban
Ki-moon. It was for seeking to
cover the UNCA event in the UN
Press Briefing Room, “lent”
without paperwork by Ban's and
Guterres' spokesman Stephane
Dujarric, that Inner City
Press was evicted and is still
restricted.
New DPI chief
Alison Smale will have to deal
with all this - and clean it
up. For now, this is how the
UN under Guterres remains.
Watch this site. Legal
footnote: the prosecution of
Ng Lap Seng was by Assistant
US attorneys Douglas Zolkind,
Janis Echenberg and Daniel
Richenthal of the US
Attorney’s Office, David Last,
on detail with the criminal
division fraud section's FCPA
unit, and Aashna Rao and David
Louison. There are (many) further
exhibits they are supposed to
disclose to the Press, through
spokespeople Nicholas Biase
and Dawn Dearden and
DC. We'll have more on all
this.
***
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