It’s for the children

With bribery and payoff charges leveled against FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) officials, it might be only natural that news investigations would focus on other multi-million-dollar, international sports organizations and games.

For example, the United Nations Children’s Fund sponsors the European Games in Azerbaijan, and, according to Justin Burke of Eurasia Net, the UN organization has not exactly been over-cooperative on disclosing its professional relationship with the former Soviet republic.

“The financial particulars surrounding UNICEF’s sponsorship are murky while the ostensible benefits it is providing in connection with the games are vague,” Burke wrote in Friday’s edition at http://www.eurasianet.org/node/73951

UNICEF puts a bureaucratic-speak on its partnership in a country not known for adherence to civil rights for all its citizens.

“UNICEF makes decisions to partner with events on a case by case basis. Underlying all decisions is an assessment of how such partnerships can benefit the cause of children in an individual country or on a broader level,” Burke quotes UNICEF spokesman Kristen Elsby as saying.

Burke also says UNICEF’s Azerbaijan’s office has bookkeeping problems.

“A review of UNICEF’s Azerbaijan office, conducted in late 2014 by the agency’s Office of Internal Audit and Investigations (OIAI), identified numerous operational flaws, including poor strategic planning, inadequate project management, improper financial oversight and inaccurate reporting on project implementation. In addition, the review found that the Azerbaijan office had a $6 million ‘funding gap’ for its 2011-15 program period.

“Spot checks of financial transactions and donor reports found such activities were ‘inadequately documented,’ according to the OIAI report.”

When an agency’s own audit office questions operations and procedures, there must be more going on than what Elsby defended as “sport as a powerful enabler to foster social inclusion for all children in Azerbaijan.”