Reports suggest that Telecommunications Consultants India Limited was involved in the wrongdoing for which the two have been held.
Josy Joseph & Uttara Choudhury
NEW DELHI/NEW YORK: The arrest of two Indians — one, a former bureaucrat — for unscrupulous dealings at the United Nations is the latest episode underscoring the murky circumstances in which the world body’s contracts are often obtained.
Reports suggest that Telecommunications Consultants India Limited (TCIL), a public-sector unit, was involved in the wrongdoing for which the two have been held.
Sanjaya Bahel, the bureaucrat who served as chief of the commodity procurement section at the UN, is accused of misusing his position to help Nishan Kohli, a Miami-based businessman, to secure UN contracts.
According to federal prosecutors in New York, Kohli provided Manhattan real estate to Bahel as quid pro quo.
Bahel, 55, who heads the commercial activities service in the UN postal administration, has been suspended without pay since August 31. UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the world body handed over information to the office of the US attorney for the southern district of New York, which formulated the indictment on Wednesday.
According to the prosecutors, the bribery scandal dates back to 2000 or earlier, when Bahel “granted exceptional access” and passed on sensitive information to Kohli on live bids. Bahel is accused of throwing out good bids to boost Kohli’s business interests. He also faces charges relating to wire fraud and conspiracy.
Kohli is managing partner of Thunderbird Industries and an agent for TCIL. If convicted, the two could be sentenced for up to 10 years in jail.
Meanwhile, the US government is seeking to seal Bahel’s bribery-linked apartment in mid-town Manhattan.
The investigators claim that from 1999 to 2004, Bahel helped TCIL receive over $100 million in contracts. The report was compiled by the Procurement Task Force set up in January to examine persistent allegations of fraud in the UN’s procurement department in the wake of the oil-for-food scandal in Iraq.
While the UN is pursuing the corruption case, the authorities in New Delhi remain indifferent to complaints made by the workers hired for the contracts.
The government has offered no comment on the manner in which the public-sector company recruited technicians for deployment in such dangerous locations as the Republic of the Congo.
The defence ministry, however, said on Thursday that Bahel, who had gone to the UN in 1995 on deputation, had taken voluntary retirement last year. “So he is no more our employee,” a senior official told DNA. Bahel had joined the Indian Defence Auditing Services in 1973.
The statement of the Protector General of Emigrants, as well as of at least one person employed for the project, suggests that TCIL and its subcontractors violated several norms.
TCIL subcontracted the recruitment process to Guru Trust Investments, a Delhi-based travel agency run by two retired military officers. The agency did not have the licence to recruit people for foreign employment.
Shijoy John, one of the complainants, said he paid Rs50,000 to procure the temporary job in the Congo. But when he reported at the UN peacekeeping mission there in 2001, he was turned away by local UN officials. Guru Trust authorities had initially refused to examine John’s grievances. But when the agency received a legal notice, it returned Rs50,000 to John and allegedly made him sign some blank papers.
TCIL has disowned any links to the contract.
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