Quote from our UN staff unions post yesterday titled “Despite the mismanagement at our pension fund, its
board is about to reward its management with more autonomy through new financial
rules and more senior posts": "It is clear that the pension fund’s leadership has not been candid with the Board and other stakeholders.”
Other reliable sources provide equally clear indication that both the CEO and the RSG in their strenuous lobbying of Board members have glossed over major deficiencies on their respective sides of the Fund, including low investment performance; and reliably reported investment in arms and tobacco on the IMD side; and on the Fund Secretariat side, a protracted dispute involving DM, the staff unions, and the CEO about the causes and extent of the backlog in pension payments.
Also reliably reported: on both sides of the Fund, senior posts kept vacant; discrimination against staff; while the IMD operates (according to a Pension Board committee) “in an environment of “weakened investment governance and risk management” and “in violation of investment policy” and the CEO selects an OIOS staff member who worked on Fund auditing for years for a D1 post in the Fund and asks the Pension Board for more senior posts, “not at the junior level where the hard work is being done to reduce the payment backlog” (UN staff unions).
Now both the RSG and CEO appear to be poised to get even more power in the form of revised financial rules that will allow ever more leeway in procurement and even more outsourcing of investment management to banks and hedge funds, and other external managers than currently exists.
Yesterday we heard from Fund staff representatives who had traveled to Vienna as CCISUA advisers who were refused participation in meetings with the CEO and Deputy CEO, always a clear sign that management is involved in a cover up and wants to exclude anyone in possession of the facts.
However much our Fund leadership and those who aid and abet them in an increasingly plutocratic environment believe their lobbying efforts are reaping the rewards and power they crave to keep moving our Fund in the wrong direction; however much they’re enabled by a complicit or oblivious Pension Board, Department of Management, Human Resources, and our retirement organization, AFICS/FAFICS, this is no time to give up. Ban’s legacy hangs in the balance and time is running out for him to act. But he's not the only one, and Pension Board members also need to recall that they're accountable and responsible to us: the participants and beneficiaries.
Whatever happens, we're in the for the long haul. And now is the moment to dig deeper and find reserves of energy and commitment to keep the issues in the public eye, to expose inefficiency and worse. Let the world know what our UN leadership has been trying to cover up for so long: inefficiency; mismanagement; and weak whistleblower protection. Sign the petition (at 4.19 pm today had reached 13,000 signatures) now if you haven’t already done so, and encourage as many as possible to do the same. (For brevity's sake, what I'm writing here is the tip of the iceberg). Go to the CCISUA website to learn more about the issues that threaten our Fund.
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