THE UN Secretary-General has used his end-of-year press conference to lash out at the media in general, and The Times in particular, for their coverage of the Oil-for-Food scandal and his role in it.

Kofi Annan singled out James Bone, New York correspondent of The Times, after he questioned Mr Annan about a Mercedes jeep that his son, Kojo, imported into Ghana using his father’s diplomatic immunity to avoid taxes.

Saddam Hussein’s manipulation of the UN’s $64 billion Oil-for-Food programme enabled him to circumvent international sanctions and raise hundreds of millions dollars, through kickbacks on UN-supervised sales of oil and imports of humanitarian supplies. Kojo Annan worked for a Swiss firm, Cotecna, that won a lucrative UN contract to monitor those imports.

Mr Bone has persistently questioned Mr Annan about these issues, and on Wednesday night the Secretary General’s patience snapped. “I think you’re being very cheeky,” he exclaimed, and continued: “Listen, James Bone, you’ve been behaving like an overgrown schoolboy in this room for many, many months and years. You are an embarrassment to your colleagues and to your profession. Please stop misbehaving.”

At the end of the conference Jim Wurst, president of the UN Correspondents’ Association, told Mr Annan that Mr Bone had a right to pose questions and was not an embarrassment. “You have the right to ask all questions you want to ask,” Mr Annan replied. “I reserve the right to refuse to answer questions I don’t want to answer. But there is a certain behaviour and a certain mutual respect which we have to respect.”

An investigation by Paul Volcker, former US Federal Reserve Chairman, cleared Mr Annan of influencing the award of the contract, but strongly criticised his management of the programme.

Mr Annan told reporters that they had focused unduly on himself and his son, and missed the big story — the thousands of companies and countries that paid kickbacks to Saddam’s Government.

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