United Nations Scanner Deal — Or Is It Scammer Deal?
By George Russell
Fox News
April 4, 2008
The mystery of the airport body scanners purchased by the United Nations Development Program for Venezuela is no longer just skin deep.
FOX News questioned UNDP’s purchase of $2.3 million worth of airport walk-through body scanners for Hugo Chavez’s radical socialist government in Venezuela, in a story on April 1. Two days later, UNDP replied by posting a number of documents on the Internet, all of which raise new questions about whether the entire deal was a façade for a scam, and whether the scanners were ever shipped at all.
Among other things, the number of scanners varies from document to document, the same purchase order has two different dates on two different documents, and the major document justifying the entire project has a termination date 3 1/2 years before UNDP approved the entire scanner purchase. Further, that project document never mentions airports or scanners at all.
The documents posted by UNDP Thursday night further undermine its claim that the 2007 scanner purchase on behalf of a Venezuelan customs and income tax authority known as SENIAT was the result of an "objective, transparent, efficient" procurement exercise that emerged from a fair and open bid.
Secret UNDP procurement committee documents dated June 15, 2007, and published by FOX News in its April 1 story, show that UNDP authorized a waiver of competitive bidding on the project and awarded the contract to a Venezuelan distributor called Setronix C.A.
In the original story, FOX also reported that L3 Communications, manufacturer of the 19 ProVision airport body scanners described in the UNDP waiver, said that it had only shipped 17 scanners to Venezuela, and those were for the Venezuelan corrections system.
On April 2, UNDP headquarters published an initial Web site posting that attempted to rebut the FOX News story of the previous day. Late on April 3, UNDP edited into the same posting a claim that FOX "suggests that a shipment of scanning equipment never occurred and claims the company in question, L3 Communications, has no record of the transaction." It then offered documents to refute the assertion — which FOX, in fact, had not made.
