Kofi's Friend Maurice Strong

Just down the hall from Kofi's office was Maurice Strong's. Now that Strong is under investigation for oil-for-food scamming, his long closeness to Kofi is just one more question thrown to the funeral-pyre-high stack of questions about Kofi's ability to dodge disgrace in the oil-for-food scandal. But oil-for-food is just the latest sordid episode in Murray's astonishingly slimey career.

Here's some more, from Canada Free Press with a hat tip to Greenie Watch:

It all began with the flight of Canadian Maurice Strong’s Earth Council from Costa Rica ....

The Costa Rican government has been pursuing the Earth Council for payment of U.S.$1.65 million, for the wrongful sale of a tract of land it imprudently donated to the Council. The land was donated to the Council by the Costa Rican government with the agreement that, if the Council moved, it would have to return the land.

It was in 1996 when Costa Rica granted the Council the land in question. All Hell broke loose when it was discovered that the Earth Council sold the land that was not theirs to sell in the first place.

Even while Costa Rican authorities were investigating the crime, Strong landed down the hall from Kofi. A couple years later, Strong was at it again:

Incredibly, while Strong was organizing the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June of 1992, in the same month of the same year, Costa Rica’s Ministry of Natural Resources were filing charges against Strong and his partner in Desarollos Ecologicos S.A., Julio Garcia for building the $35 million Villas del Caribe condo hotel on land located in the Kekoldi Indian Reservation and Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge–without official permits. Strong’s son ran the luxury hotel.

And finally there's the "Kyoto Kickback Kleptocracy," heralded by Bill Clinton as "the world’s first formal program to curb global warming through an international market in greenhouse gas emission reductions." Earth Council was at the core of this scheme, under which companies would buy credits allowing them to emit greenhouse gases with the money going to restore rainforests in ... where else? ... Costa Rica. And who was in the middle of this program? Maurice Strong.

The Costa Rican office for Joint Implementation (OCIC) was working with Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS), a world leader in inspection, testing and verification, to "certify" the offsets.

Add to this mix, the entry of a Geneva-based entity called the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), brought to the table by Strong and sponsored by the Earth Council.

Of course, the deal was a scam. Companies paid for the credits but the game pretty much ended there, making the program one of the biggest scams of all time.

Given such a sordid career, one has to ask why Strong was anywhere but in jail, why he was the UN's emissary to as crooked a country as North Korea, why he has been Kofi's long-time friend, why he's not in jail.

Ah, but of course. It's the UN, the world's premier scam-booster. Witness oil-for-food and, of course, global warming.