"On Dec. 16, 2018, Dmitry Ershov, a Russian national who once managed a multimillion-dollar environmental project for the United Nations Development Program in Russia, sat down in his Moscow study and recorded a sobering videotaped message to the project's key international funders: The United Nations is ripping you off.
'Donors, please do not let the UNDP get away with stealing your money and covering it up for years and years,' said Ershov, sitting stiffly at a desk, addressing his camera in heavily accented English.
Ershov is one of nearly a dozen former U.N. employees, auditors, and consultants who have been flagging concerns for nearly a decade about mismanagement and alleged misappropriation of millions of dollars in international funds from the Global Environment Facility, or GEF, which are intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Russia. But their concerns about irregularities in the program-which were first reported internally back in 2011-were largely dismissed or ignored for several years by their superiors in Istanbul, New York, and Washington, as well as by donor governments, including the United States.
A Foreign Policy investigation into the case-based on an extensive trove of internal U.N. documents and interviews with key players-provides further evidence to support Ershov's claims and sheds an unflattering light on the failings of the U.N., the GEF, and the donor governments themselves to provide reliable oversight of well-meaning programs to combat environmental scourges, including the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming. A 2017 confidential audit appendix-which was shared with UNDP officials in New York and Istanbul but has never previously been made public-found 'strong indicators of deliberate misappropriation' of millions of dollars in funds from the project between 2010 and 2014..."