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WMO
whistleblower awarded more than $550,000
28
August
2009
In
what is believed to be its largest judgment to date in its 64
year existence, the International Labour Office Administrative
Tribunal (ILOAT) recently ordered the World Meteorological
Organisation (WMO) to pay its former internal auditor Maria do
Rosario Veiga nearly USD$500,000 in exemplary, material and
moral damages, lost salary and allowances after it found that
she was harassed, defamed
and
wrongfully terminated by the WMO’s Secretary-General Michel
Jarraud and/or other WMO officials in the course of performing
her statutory audit duties.
Ms. Veiga, 49, a Portuguese/Italian national and experienced
professional auditor who had worked for WMO for 4 years, and
previously more than 5 years for another UN agency, was suddenly
fired in November 2006 after she refused to discontinue her
investigations into or otherwise cover-up an internal
embezzlement scheme in which some USD$3.5 million was stolen by
senior WMO officials and used in part to apparently rig the
outcome of the 2003 election of the organisation’s chief
executive, which election resulted in the appointment of its
current Secretary General, Michel Jarraud, a French national,
who at the time had been the WMO’s Deputy Secretary-General.
The WMO is a UN specialized agency headquartered in Geneva, and
is the co-founder and sponsor of the UN’s global warming body,
UNIPCC. In April 2007, nine US Congressmen wrote a letter to
the US Comptroller General, demanding that he conduct an
investigation into Ms Veiga’s termination as well as her
whistleblower claims, citing the US government’s contribution to
the WMO of more than USD$10 million over the prior decade. Such
request was ignored by the then UN Comptroller General who was
interestingly elected to the Independent
Audit Advisory Committee (IAAC) of the United Nations later in
2007, and no such investigation ever took place. As of the
present date, none of the senior WMO officials responsible for
the actions that led to the recent ILOAT award have been
sanctioned or punished. Despite wide press coverage of Ms.
Veiga’s allegations, and the initiation of a criminal corruption
investigation by the Geneva Attorney General, in early 2007 Mr.
Jarraud was over-whelmingly elected to another term by the WMO
Congress.
In a companion case, Judgment N° 2742, decided in July 2008, the
ILOAT awarded Ms. Veiga CHF 79,000, bringing her total award
paid by WMO from its public funds to more than USD$ 550,000. As
the ILOAT refused to order Ms. Veiga’s reinstatement or
otherwise compensate her for lost future earnings, she intends
to pursue her rights to be made whole through several companion
claims that include a criminal complaint pending against her
harassers in Geneva, an alien tort claims act pending before the
US Federal Appeals Court of the 2nd Circuit, and a claim before
the European Court of Human Rights challenging the WMO’s
immunity from Swiss law.
Related Information
International Labor Organization, Administrative Tribunal –
Judgment No. 2861, Geneva 8 July 2009
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