Indian UN official pleads not guilty to bribery

New York, Nov 3: A UN purchasing official pleaded not guilty to buying two luxury Manhattan apartments at drastically cut prices in return for steering more than 50 million dollars in contracts to Indian firms.

US Magistrate Judge Douglas Eaton in federal district court yesterday ordered the U N official, Sanjay Bahel, 55, freed on a 900,000 dollars bond. But he required Bahel to put up the apartments as security along with 75,000 dollars in cash and an Acura sport vehicle.

Bahel had been chief of the U N commodity procurement wing and was suspended without pay by the world body on August 31 while investigations were under way.

Also arrested, in Miami, was Indian businessman Nishan Kohli, managing partner of Thunderbird Industries, LLC, and an agent for the Telecommunications Consultants India Ltd., an Indian government enterprise. Kohli also pleaded not guilty and was released on $1 million bail in Miami.

According to federal prosecutor Michael Garcia, who charged both men with bribery, Bahel in 2000 or earlier granted ''exceptional access'' to Kohli, with information on bidding. On occasion, Bahel ''even cancelled bids by competing companies and rebid contracts'' to give Kohli's business interests a competitive advantage, Garcia said.

Consequently, Kohli secured a number of contracts for TCIL, including radio communications and computer equipment as well as information technology.

In return, the indictment charged, Kohli purchased the two condominium units at the Dag Hammarskjold Towers for 1.24 million dollars in 2003 and provided them to Bahel and his family for two years at greatly reduced rent or no rent at all.

In 2005, Kohli sold the units to Bahel for less than 1.2 million dollars, 700,000 dollars below market value, drawing a protest from the building's condominium board, the indictment alleges.

Both men face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Returned For Questioning

Bahel's lawyer, Raymond Levites, argued for 500,000 dollars bail and said that his client had complied with a request by U N investigators to cut his trip to India short to return to the United States for more questioning.

Bahel was taken into custody on Wednesday on his way to pick up his son from John F. Kennedy International Airport, only because authorities ''thought he was going to leave the country,'' Levites said.

''If he didn't want to face the charges he wouldn't have come back,'' Levites said.

Assistant U S Attorney Jacob Buchdahl argued for a 1 million dollars bond and said he requested that amount because the deal for the condominiums, less than two blocks from the United Nations compound in Manhattan, was a ''million dollar fraud.'' The United Nations said in a statement on Wednesday that Secretary-General Kofi Annan had received a request from prosecutors in the U S Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York to waive Bahel's immunity and did so.

Bahel, formerly of the Indian government's military auditing service, first came under scrutiny in September 2004 when a U N internal audit investigated contracts he handled. But no action was taken until earlier this year.

U S Ambassador John Bolton gave credit to Christopher Burnham, the U.N. undersecretary-general for management, and the highest ranking American in the U N secretariat.

''The work of the FBI and the prosecutors was assisted by the procurement task force set up here in the secretariat largely at the behest of Chris Burnham,'' Bolton told reporters.

Reuters

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