In corrupt UN of Guterres French UNESCO and DG Azoulay in unhealthy lame duck period

By Matthew Russell Lee & sources, Exclusive

UNESCO, like the whole UN system under Antonio Guterres is falling apart in corruption and fraud.

Inner City Press has been reporting on serious malfeasance by the French Audrey Azoulay administration at UNESCO in Paris, almost as bad as Antonio Guterres' corruption in and of the UN in New York. A fish rots from the head.

With just 390 days to go before the end of her mandate, DG Azoulay is desperately looking for a new job, hoping to integrate a ministerial position in France. With her track record at UNESCO, this now seems an insurmountable task.  On September 8, Inner City Press wrote about the full report by IOS, document 220 EX/27.INF, prepared at the request of the Executive Board (here) 

Our efforts to expose transgressions at UNESCO are now paying off. After years of uninterrupted abuse of power by the French Drama Queen, DG Audrey Azoulay, the major financial error committed by her management team has led to the sanctions against UNESCO's two most senior officials in charge of budget and administration, who were removed from their posts in order to put out the fire under Azoulay's backside. 

The lawless management of UNESCO's 2023 deficit revealed by Inner City Press (here and here) has led to the departure of the Chief financial officer (CFO), Magdolna Bona and to the hasty retirement of the ADG for Management, Nicholas Jeffreys of the UK. Instead of sacking them both without further delay, just after the publication of the IOS report, it now remains to be seen whether both will go with a fat financial package that would shut their mouths, or whether the member states will be able to prevent it.

This is just the beginning of DG Audrey Azoulay's institutional suffering during the last period of her mandate. The atmosphere at UNESCO is typical of the end-of-mandate mood among staff and member states. Defections at the highest level lead to the appointment of interim directors instead of full appointments to these posts.  Thus, the director of Governing Bodies is an interim Italian neophyte. The acting director of the CFO is an Indian who has never worked on budgetary matters before, the ADG for Africa and External Relations is an interim Congolese, nearly 70 years old and already retired, and with the departure of the ADG for Administration, Nicholas Jeffreys, another interim will have to be appointed by Azoulay.

Azoulay's cabinet explains that these appointments are all temporary. If member states accept this explanation, Azoulay will have a free hand to choose any other senior official during the remaining 390 days of her regime and appoint them without proper recruitment procedures, since she will be able to justify these appointments in the same way, claiming that they are only temporary, until she leaves the organization next year. This is utter nonsense, and running UNESCO with interim directors will soon prove impractical.

As some ambassadors joke in the corridors, as it goes, the next vacancy requiring an interim could be that of DG Azoulay.  Indeed, rumors of her precipitous departure from the UN Agency are being amplified these days not by her opponents, but rather by her good friends. Let's hope this is not the case, and that she stays on to be questioned and to take responsibility for all the major mistakes she has made over the years, right up to the last day of her mandate, in the autumn of 2025. 

One of these mistakes, which illustrates her complete disregard for the public money decent use, as well as her desperate desire for personal publicity at all costs, is the recent reprinting of the UNESCO World Heritage Magazine.

 After realizing that there was a nice quote instead of her photo, and that there wasn't enough visibility for her inside, she ordered all printed copies destroyed and the entire edition reprinted just so her photo could be added to the article. Here are the two versions of the same Magazine page: the second version with Azoulay's photo added to satisfy her ego and the first version as initially published, then destroyed: 

   Calculating the cost of this luxury magazine, what will member states think of destroying nearly 1,000 copies and reprinting them just to satisfy Audrey Azoulay's thirst for personal visibility? Do member states realize that their taxpayers' money is being wasted to satisfy Audrey Azoulay's exacerbated caprices?

 The one who is fully supporting Azoulay’s efforts to waste public money, is her Assistant director general (ADG) for culture, the Chilean Ernesto Ottone Ramirez. Inner City Press revealed in the past even more unpleasant information for Ottone, such as the fact that he provided a regular program budget code to pay for DG Azoulay's boat vacation on her family trip to Venice in 2022 (here ). 

 Ernesto Ottone has been a good friend of Azoulay's for many years, since her previous life as France's Minister of Culture and even before that, as intimate students, according to our sources.  On this ground, just after her election as DG, in November 2017, he became the first ADG to be confirmed by Azoulay without any competition, completely against existing procedures. Notorious for his baseless temper tantrums, feeling easily thwarted in the work process as evidence of his incompetence, regularly yelling at his subordinates, Ottone Ramirez has gotten rid of most of the experienced senior managers in the culture sector.

After promoting his previous mistress to the position of P-5 in charge of the sector's executive office, Ottone managed to secure a job for his new Spanish mistress. We'll come back to this affair later, as some internal voices are reporting serious irregularities in the recruitment of the young Spaniard. More and more member states are expressing concern about UNESCO's current moral and management crisis

. However, the solidarity of the European Union continues to guarantee the institutional impunity of French DG Azoulay. Yet criticism is coming from all sides, and will only increase in the months ahead as Azoulay's term of office draws to a close.

  This is where UNESCO stands today, a UN agency ravaged by financial misappropriations, propitious to the flourishing of abuse of power, corruption and nepotism. We will have more on all that. Watch this site.