Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A former high-ranking UN official has been named President of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD), an international mediation organization which in 2010 was the victim of a CHF3.8 million fraud.
Jean-Marie Guehenno, 61, a French national who was the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations at the UN for eight years, will take the reins of the Centre’s board.
A Legion d’Honneur officer, Guehenno’s is also affiliated with the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in New York City, and is a non-resident senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The HD Centre announced in August 2010 that it had been the victim of a multi-million franc fraud engineered by its former director of finance and administration. As a result, the Centre’s Executive Director, who had headed the organization since its creation in 1999, stepped down saying he felt “morally responsible” for the financial fiasco.
In 2010, the CHD brokered a historic agreement between the most heavily armed opposition movement in Darfur, the JEM, and the United Nations on the protection of children caught up in the conflict. The Centre is funded by several governments, private foundations and philanthropists.
Update 17:40 (video) Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD) an international mediation organization, announced Saturday 28 August that it has been the victim of a CHF3.8 million fraud engineered, it says, by its former director of finance and administration, who held several other international posts before joining the Centre.
“A number of different schemes” were used, since 2004, to carry out the theft, says the organization.
Executive Director Martin Griffiths, who has headed the the CHD since it was created in 1999, has stepped down, “because he felt morally responsible,” the official announcement notes. “The Board accepted the resignation in order to put in place a new senior management. In recognition of his experience and knowledge of mediation, the Board has asked Martin Griffiths to dedicate his time fully to the mediation activities of the organization.”
Griffiths, a lawyer, worked for the UN as director of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs (which became OCHA) in Geneva and from 1998 to 1999 he was deputy to the UN Emergency Relief coordinator in New York, when he was also the UN regional coordinator in the Balkans (1999) with the rank of UN assistant secretary-general.
KPMG brought in to determine extent of fraud
The fraud was discovered in June 2010 by senior management, at which point the CHD hired audit firm KPMG to investigate. The announcement comes six weeks after the former finance director was stripped of his right to sign for the organization. Criminal charges have now been filed against the former director, and the group is “taking steps to recover the stolen sum.”
The organization is funded by several governments, private foundations and philanthropists, all of which have been informed about the fraud.
The former director, who cannot be named under Swiss law, lists, on online networking sites and as part of his CV, work done with a number of organizations, in Geneva, the UK and the US.
Keynote speaker,World YWCA General Secretary Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda
The University of Geneva, together with five co-sponsors, kicked off the inaugural programme of the Geneva Forum on Social Change (GFSC) Friday 5 June. Keynote speakers include Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Prize Laureate and Honorary Doctor 2009 of the University of Geneva, World YWCA General Secretary Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, and Speak-it.org Director, Nick Francis.
The Forum combines documentary film screenings, workshops and panel discussions of the complex social, political and economic challenges presented in the films. The event is organized by the University of Geneva International Organizations MBA (IOMBA) Programme. Geneva Lunch spoke with Forum on Social Change Chair and IOMBA degree candidate, Patrick Huber.
GL: Can you provide some background information on how the Forum was imagined and over what time period?
Maverick Architect Michael Reynolds in Oliver Hodge's "Garbage Warrior." Photo courtesy GFSC and Oliver Hodge
Patrick Huber (PH): This came out of an event last year in Monterrey, California hosted by Independent Television Service (ITVS) out of San Francisco. The Forum was conceived in November of 2008 when ITVS approached the University of Geneva about co-sponsoring a film screening and dialogue.
I was approached as president of the Geneva University chapter of the NetImpact network, an industry network of MBA professionals and students interested in promoting corporate social responsibility. Last year the chapter sponsored a forum on sustainable development which created momentum to discuss what other advocacy efforts the network might promote.
