Former UN official convicted of bribery

NEW YORK: Former United Nations procurement official Sanjaya Bahel was on Friday convicted of charges that he helped his friend win lucrative UN contracts worth $100 million in exchange for cash and discounted luxury Manhattan apartments and could end up serving 30 years in jail.

He was convicted of bribery, wire fraud and mail fraud charges. Bahel, 57, will be kept in jail until his sentencing in September.

"I don't know whether there could be some scheme to have him depart from the country," US District Judge Thomas P Griesa said.

Bahel, who was chief of UN Commodity Procurement Department from 1999 to 2003, has maintained his innocence all along and slumped in his chair when the verdict was read in the court.

The investigation against Bahel, who is from India, was part of the inquiry set off by the Volcker Committee report in the Iraqi oil-for-food programme which had cast doubts on contacts given by peacekeeping department of the United Nations.

Bahel, who was in the field procurement unit of the procurement department of the United Nations, was investigated for bending the rules to steer millions of dollars worth of contracts to Indian firms.

In a statement issued within hours of the conviction, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed satisfaction that "justice has been done" and asserted that the conviction had resulted in large part from the extensive work done by the United Nations task force.

The world body's investigators had given an 86-page dossier on Bahel to the prosecutors.

The indictment has charged him with inviting re-bids to ensure that his friend Nishan Kohli's companies get the contracts and also providing him with access to information not available to other bidders.

Even though companies he represented benefited, Kohli cooperated with the prosecutors and testified against Bahel which helped in his conviction. For his testimony against Bahel, he will get lenient sentence for giving bribes, the charge to which he pleaded has guilty.

But Bahel's lawyer Richard Herman attacked the United Nations, saying that the "witch hunt" against him had resulted from the efforts by the world body to repair it image in the wake of several scandals, including investigation into charges of corruption in the Iraqi food-for-oil programme.

Chairman of the Procurement Task Force at the UN internal oversight office Robert Appleton denied there was a witch hunt and pointed out the argument was not bought by the jury.

During his testimony, Kohli said he had made cash payments to Bahel and rented two luxury apartments to him on a discounted rent and then sold them at much lower than the prevailing price. He also said he had arranged strip club visits and prostitutes for two UN officials for 6000 dollar a night and repeated it for one of them.

Prosecutors had charged Bahel with helping two firms represented by Kohli to get contracts. The companies were identified as the Telecommunications Consultants India Ltd, owned by the Indian government, and Thunderbird Industries.

Kohli said Bahel gave him so much inside information to his family that he was considered a business partner and prosecutors alleged that Bahel got 10 per cent of profits that Kohils earned through UN contracts.

He also testified that the inside information that Bahel gave helped the companies he represented to get contracts. His family sought Bahel's advice in connection some two dozen contracts.