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[Hank Chinaski]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,168591,00.html

• The U.N.'s Spreading Bribery Scandal: Russian Ties and Global Reach
  
  NEW YORK — How widespread is the corruption at the United Nations? The multibillion-dollar Iraq Oil-for-Food (search) scandal was just the beginning.
  
  Now the issue is becoming the scale of corruption in the U.N.'s normal operations — and which individuals and corporations are reaping the benefits of a network of bribery and conspiracy that investigators have just begun to uncover. So far, those identities are still a mystery — but perhaps not for much longer.
  
  Last Friday, federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted the head of the U.N.'s own budget oversight committee, a Russian named Vladimir Kuznetsov (search), on charges of laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bribes paid by companies seeking contracts with the United Nations.
  
  Kuznetsov, who has pleaded innocent, allegedly took a cut so openly that he had part of it deposited into the United Nations' own staff credit union in New York.
  
  Kuznetsov's arrest is the latest twist in the scandal involving the U.N. procurement department, which was the longtime post of Alexander Yakovlev (search), another Russian U.N. official recently fingered by U.S. federal investigators.