Nairobi, Kenya - A confidential UN report alleges that Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, his former foreign minister and an American law firm conspired to steal public funds by engaging in secret contracts that gave them hefty percentages from the country's recovered overseas assets.
Nairobi, Kenya - A confidential UN report alleges that Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, his former foreign minister and an American law firm conspired to steal public funds by engaging in secret contracts that gave them hefty percentages from the country's recovered overseas assets.
The report, obtained by Al Jazeera and presented to the UN Security Council in July, urges the UN to call on member states and financial institutions to freeze Somali assets under their jurisdiction until "a genuinely transparent and accountable recovery process can be established".
"Continuation of a recovery process in secret ... risks further exposure of overseas assets to misappropriation," said the report, urging the Somali government to disclose the original list of identified assets, which now is only known to President Mohamud and the Maryland-based law firm Shulman Rogers as well as two other individuals.
The Somali government said it would only respond to the report in detail when it is officially released. Others accused of wrongdoing denied the allegations levelled against them.
Shulman Rogers dismissed the allegations as "false" and "malicious," with Jeremy Schulman, the law firm's man in charge of the Somalia project, saying, in a statement sent to Al Jazeera, that the report's intention is "to discredit the Somali government, our law firm, and the individuals who have worked hard to support the asset recovery project for the people of Somalia".
Jarat Chopra, the coordinator for Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group who presented the report to the UN Security Council's sanction committee, said his group stands by its findings, but refused to comment further.
Terms challenged
The group's mandate includes monitoring misappropriation of public funds as well as reporting on the arms embargo imposed on Somalia in 1992.
The report says attempts to steal assets were thwarted after former Central Bank Governor Yussur Abrar challenged the terms of Shulman Rogers. Abrar quit after seven weeks in office. Her action generated an international scrutiny that later enabled her successor to protect some of the recovered assets.
The report, however, alleges there is still "a secret architecture of misappropriation," involving President Mohamud, former Foreign Minister Fawzia Yusuf Adam, Shulman Rogers as well as Musa Haji Mohamed Ganjab and Abdiaziz Hassan Giyaajo Amalo. The report says Ganjab and Amalo, who vehemently deny the allegations, served as government advisors as well as facilitators for Shulman Rogers.
"What Yussur said is baseless," Adam said in a recent interview with the satellite TV station, Somali Channel.
The July report said its findings "reflects exploitation of public authority for private interests and indicates at the minimum a conspiracy to divert the recovery of overseas assets in an irregular manner".
Mohamed Husein Gaas, Horn of Africa analyst at the Oslo, Norway-based Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, told Al Jazeera the UN allegations against President Mohamud will definitely disappoint many Somalis who thought that "his regime would be a fresh start towards restoring a credible Somali government".
"President Mohamud would have better reassured the Somali public if he had admitted his administration's shortcomings and started to fix them," he told Al Jazeera.
The report cites Shulman Rogers as saying that $12,326,971.63 worth of assets held in the United States was transferred to its custody, with the firm retaining $2,711,125.97 for "fees, expenses and set asides,” including its five percent bonus, $616,348.63 and six percent for "expense set aside," $739,618.30.
"A final amount of USD 9,001,092.25 was transferred on 2 and 5 December 2013 to a Central Bank account at the Ziraat Bankasi (Agricultural Bank of the Republic of Turkey)."
The current governor of the central bank of Somalia, Bashir Issa Ali, did not receive any indication of the source of $9,001,092.25, or which assets the transfer related to or an accounting of recovered assets, said the report.
It also alleges that a total of $922,913.38 was withdrawn, between July 30 to August 31, 2013, from the central bank of Somalia to defend Abdusalam Omer, the former central banker whom the UN accused of corruption last year.
The report says the move further exacerbated allegations of using public funds for private interests. The 2013 allegations concerned Omer himself and not the government as a whole, says the report.
The report alleges that Shulman Rogers conducted a "counter-investigation" to preserve its control over the effort to recover overseas assets and counter any perceived opposition to it.
"'Pie-cutting' of overseas assets by those involved in the project entailed retention of excessive percentages and direct payments from recovered assets as well as attempts to circumvent deposits in the Central Bank of Somalia," Chopra said.
Frozen assets
But Jeremy Schulman from Shulman Rogers countered: "Instead of misappropriating assets, the records show a careful attempt to safeguard assets and place them under the control of the Central Bank and the president."
Foreign countries and financial institutions have frozen Somalia's overseas assets following the implosion of that country's central government in 1991, but feverish efforts to recover such assets - including cash, gold and ships - have restarted after the election of President Mohamud in 2012.
In 2013, however, the Shulman Rogers won an exclusive contract with Somalia's Central Bank for the recovery of the country's oversea assets.
The contract allowed the firm to retain six per cent of all recovered Somali assets for unnamed costs and expenses, in addition to the five per cent of all recovered assets as a bonus additional to its fees. The deal also did not oblige the firm to transfer the assets, when recovered, directly to the central bank, but instead put them under the control of President Mohamud.
As per the central bank's law, the bank is autonomous and should not take instructions from government entities, including the president.
But the UN report alleges that Shulman Rogers "consistently exploited the authority of the president and the authority of the Central Bank Governor intermittently as levers of convenience, placing the assets under the control of the president pursuant to a contract signed by the Central Bank Governor".
"While the contract relied on the authority and the name of the Central Bank as the client, control over the assets was intended to be exclusively retained by the president, thereby exposing the recovered assets to misappropriation by those involved in the recovery project," said the report.
According to the report, Abrar, the ex-governor, was appointed in part to exploit her banking background in order to get her open bank accounts whose aims were to divert public funds after her predecessor was discredited in an earlier UN report.
"From the moment I was appointed," she said in her resignation letter, "I have been continuously asked to sanction deals and transactions that would contradict my personal values and violate my fiduciary responsibility to the Somali people as head of the nation's monetary authority."
During her brief time on the job, Abrar was rebuked for raising corruption issues in her first encounter with President Mohamud and subjected to threats, pressure and abusive language, said the report, disclosing that President Mohamud rejected Abrar’s repeated requests to get the original list of identified overseas assets as well as summary statements of recovered assets from Shulman Rogers.
"Ms. Abrar was expected to either join the group of individuals working with the president or be controlled so she silently acquiesced to them," said the report.
Abrar finally decided to leave the country for the United Arab Emirates under the pretext of signing off on a Dubai account whose aim would have been to deposit diverted funds and other bilateral assistance with no control from the central bank.
Ali, the current central bank governor, eventually revoked the bank's contract with Shulman Rogers on May 13, 2014. But Jeremy Schulman told Al Jazeera that the firm is "in continuing discussions with the Federal Government of Somalia regarding renegotiating our contract".
Humantarian Assistance to Somalia
The Australian Government will provide a further $5 million in humanitarian assistance to Somalia. The funding will be delivered through the United Nation's Somalia Common Humanitarian Fund to provide Somalis in need with emergency food, water, sanitation, shelter and medical assistance.
St. Paul's first female Somali police officer has critics and fans
Kdra Mohamed walks into an old haunt, the Grocery and Meat Market on the city's north side, where as a girl she shopped with her mother.
She breathes in the heady smell of Somali spices, halal meat and the bread she has loved since growing up in a nearby public housing project.
Two girls in silky abaya gowns rush to embrace her, their mother standing back shyly. The market's owner, Abdi Mohamed, steps from behind his shelves.
"Kadra, it's you," he says in the lilting Somali language. He asks about her mother, then pauses. "It's good to see you in uniform."
At 22, Mohamed is a newly minted cop on the beat, a community liaison officer making a courtesy call to a merchant, a time-tested neighborhood policing method. Still, this visit — and each one she makes in this immigrant bastion — breaks new ground.
In March, the St. Paul Police Department hired Mohamed, its first female Somali officer, a move designed to improve the sometimes tense relations with 80,000 Somali Americans in the Twin Cities — more than half of them in St. Paul — the nation's largest Somali community.
Each time she wears her crisp blue police uniform with its thick black leather belt and handcuffs, the 5-foot-1 Mohamed also dons her hijab, the traditional head scarf worn in public by many Muslim women.
Her presence has divided this Midwestern city of 290,000 residents. One blogger called her hiring a politically correct and potentially perilous gesture. By allowing her to wear a hijab, he wrote, the department "has placed her life on the line in more ways than one."
The department modified the hijab with metal snaps that allow the head scarf to come off in a scuffle. But Mohamed makes no excuses. Once an aspiring lawyer, she shifted her goal to police work because of her desire to help her community.
"I'm a target for those with concerns about safety," she says. "I'm a short, black, Muslim female. Of course I stand out."
But criticism has also come from the Somali American community. Older Somalis say she's breaking a cultural creed: wearing pants and short-sleeve shirts and working closely among men in public. After Mohamed passes her police exams, she will apply for a job as a sworn officer. That means she'll carry a gun.
Mohamed's hiring comes at a crucial time for the Somali community. The rise of such Somali street gangs as the St. Pistol Boys and Somali Outlaws has followed news reports that Somali American youths here have been recruited to join extremist forces in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.
"And here comes Kadra Mohamed, who has defied logic for whites and Somali alike," local activist Omar Jamal said. "She's a mystery to both cultures."
Mohamed was born in a refugee camp in Kenya in 1991, not long after her parents fled Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, and its nearly daily bombings and strife. Her father, Hassan, was Ethiopian, and he and her Somali mother, Zamzam, were joined by an arranged marriage.
"Love takes time," Mohamed said. "Their relationship started off cordially, then a friendship developed before they grew into loving one another. They got lucky."
The family eventually relocated to the Twin Cities, an area with more than 60,000 Hmong residents and a reputation for welcoming immigrants. The couple had four more children — two boys and two girls.
Her father, an immigration case worker, died when she was 12, and Mohamed grew up fast.
While at St. Cloud State University, she decided to start wearing her hijab — and quickly learned about racism in provincial Minnesota. Strangers told her to "take the towel off your head." An older woman drove up to her in a parking lot and ordered, "Go back to your terror state."
Last year, St. Paul police disciplined two officers after pictures surfaced online of them wearing Muslim women's clothing — one in blackface makeup — to a Halloween party. Both publicly apologized.
As a community liaison officer, Mohamed is often called upon to translate, but most of her duties are to show a friendly face in public housing projects. Often she rides with partner Tom Lee, 24, who works in the Hmong community.
Civil rights activists have applauded St. Paul's move to join Washington, D.C., police as the only two departments nationwide to allow female officers to wear a hijab. They dismiss claims that the scarves will make them targets.
"That's similar to the argument made by white policemen in the 1950s against working with a black officer, because they didn't want to be targeted by a bigot," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the nonprofit Council on American-Islamic Relations. "It didn't make sense then and it doesn't make sense now."
St. Paul Police Assistant Chief Todd Axtell said all rules, even uniform codes, were made to be changed. "In the early 1970s, you had to be at least 5-foot-8 to become a St. Paul police officer," Axtell said, who is 5 feet, 7 inches tall. "If that rule hadn't been changed, I wouldn't be here today."
Later, walking to a community cookout at a housing complex, Mohamed runs into a high school classmate, Nada Mohamed, also wearing a hijab. The friend is proud of Kadra, but says women her grandmother's age don't agree.
"They think she's crazy," she says. "They don't think a Muslim woman should be a police officer, no matter if she wears a hijab or not."
Mohamed walks away smiling, a gap between her two front teeth giving her a girlish look.
She's still set on being hired as a sworn officer, even if her mother insists she won't let a gun in the house. "I tell her, 'Mom, you've been though a civil war. How can you be afraid of guns?'"
One day, Mohamed says, she might be working as a gang unit officer or helping the department identify political extremists in her community. One thing she's not afraid of is arresting a Somali man, an unimaginable scenario for many in the male-dominated culture.
"I'll speak to him in our language — Somali to Somali," she says. "I'll explain that this is my job.
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UN alleges 'plot' to steal Somali assets
Nairobi, Kenya - A confidential UN report alleges that Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, his former foreign minister and an American law firm conspired to steal public funds by engaging in secret contracts that gave them hefty percentag