Audio 1 - Jorge Chediek Blamed ICP For Spurrin by InnerCityPress

By Matthew Russell Lee, Exclusive Patreon
BBC - Guardian UK - Honduras - CJR - PFT

UN GATE, Aug 5 – The Office for South-South Cooperation (OSSC) is well known for being the most corrupt office in UNDP, with its notorious history spanning nearly two decades. In 2015, a colossal bribery scandal led the FBI to the arrest and subsequent prosecution of Chinese billionaire Ng Lap Seng and former President of the UN General Assembly John Ashe.

Since then Patrick Ho's CEFC China Energy replaced Ng, with a direct connection to Secretary General Antonio Guterres who had the Press roughed up and banned to try to hide it.

Now Inner City Press publishes this exclusive: In a recent staff meeting, the disgraced OSSC Director Jorge Chediek announced his imminent departure from OSSC. This comes after he bragged about being cleared of all wrongdoing following a two-year investigation for fraud, waste, mismanagement, abuse and harassment undertaken by the UNDP Office for Audit and Investigation (OAI) between 2018 and 2020. True to form, Mr. Chediek condemned whistleblowers for reporting wrongdoing to UNDP authorities, “the office has been under a cloud, particularly because some of the disloyal colleagues that we have leaked information in a very biased way with false documentation”. It’s worth noting that Mr. Chediek’s departure should not be attributed to any robust internal oversight mechanisms. On the contrary, UNDP management has time and again demonstrated its tendency to side with crooked (white) officials.

In fact, it is only thanks to Inner City Press' continuous exposés of the scandalous abuse of taxpayers’ money by UNDP officials that forced the hand of top brass. Over the past few years, Inner City Press has exposed several substantiated cases of waste, abuse and harassment committed by Mr. Chediek and his office.

In 2018, when OAI launched the large-scale investigation into OSSC, Mr. Chediek blamed the ICP exposé of his fraudulent acts for triggering the investigation: “There are some publications that have been made in some media, most of the information that were published there are non-issues because they are official activities like my travels”, “there are other things that are published that are wrong, so that’s what triggered this investigation.” Audio 1 here