Foxnews.com, MSNBC.com, and CNN.com are reporting that the United States Attorney’s Office has apparently taken Alexander Yakovlev into custody. Mr. Yakovlev is an ex-United Nations procurement official, and he resigned his post in June amid allegations surrounding the Oil-For-Food scandal investigation.
The $65 billion Oil-for-Food program was begun in 1996, under the supervision of the United Nations. See Warren Hoge, U.N. Inquiry Says Oil-for-Food Chief Accepted Kickbacks, N.Y. Times, Aug. 8, 2005, available here. Under the program, “Iraqi oil revenue was used to buy relief goods for Iraqis strapped by United Nations sanctions but…was exploited by Saddam Hussein to skim $1.7 billion in illegal profits.” Id. Recently, Paul Volcker was named to head the U.N.’s Independent Inquiry Committee to investigate allegations of misdoing.
At the request of
U.S. prosecutors, the United Nations has lifted Mr. Yakovlev’s diplomatic immunity, and Secretary General Kofi Annan’s chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, told reporters that “we believe Mr. Yakovlev is already in custody.”
According to CNN.com, Mr. Volcker had earlier announced that the probe into the Oil-For-Food scandal discovered that Mr. Yakovlev “solicited a bribe from a French company that bid unsuccessfully on an Oil-for-Food contract.” While the report found no evidence that the company paid the desired bribe, it did find “that more than $1.3 million had been wired to a bank account [Mr.] Yakovlev controlled on the Caribbean island of Antigua since 2000.”
Another diplomat was named in Mr. Volcker’s report: Benon Sevan, who, according to Foxnews.com, was “the one-time head of the Oil-for-Food program who severed his ties with the United Nations on Sunday [August 7, 2005],” and is accused of “taking kickbacks under the multi-billion dollar humanitarian operating aimed at easing the effects of sanctions on Iraqi civilians.” According to the New York Times article cited above, the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, announced last month that he had opened a state criminal investigation of Mr. Sevan.
If it turns out that Mr. Yakovlev was arrested under a federal indictment, which seems to be the case, then a federal corruption statute comes into play. Corruption of public officials is both a federal crime and a transnational crime. Under 18 U.S.C. § 201(b)(2), it is a crime for a public official to seek or receive anything of value in return for
- being influenced in the performance of an official act,
- being influenced to commit a fraud on the United States, or
- being induced to committing an act in violation of his official duty.
A violation of this statute could result in a fine, imprisonment for not more than 15 years, or both.
To be successful, however, the United States needs to have jurisdiction over the individual. And it is not entirely clear under what statute the U.S. Attorney’s Office is operating; under section 201(a)(1), the term “public official” does not include foreign diplomats at the United Nations.
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