Written by via mukeshkapila.org
Mischief-makers at UNOPS are busy and the UN Secretary-General must quickly appoint its new Executive Director
Those following my writings on the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) are familiar with the sordid saga of misconduct, mismanagement, and misappropriation tantamount to corruption and perhaps fraud.
Also evident at this multi-billion-dollar United Nations agency have been a leadership that lied through it thief and practiced rampant profiteering, rapacious rent-seeking behaviour, enjoyed egregious conflicts of interest and revelled in raw abuse of power. Not to mention UNOPS’s broken governance, absent oversight, shredded whistleblower protection, and zero transparency and accountability.
Everything that could go wrong at the top of UNOPS did so through the flagrant misbehaviour of its leaders. They ran the agency as a personal fiefdom in outrageous violation of all UN rules, regulations, and codes of conduct. This happened under the world’s gaze while the Executive Board slumbered and the administration of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres looked away.
The UNOPS scandal was exposed only when desperate staff decided that enough was enough. They urged me to voice their story because they could not do so themselves, due to the bullying, threats and intimidation the organisation practiced against those who had the courage to stand up.