Fund report lacking, BBC show claims

Daniel Pye, The Phnom Penh Post
Wed, 4 December 2013

An investigation by BBC news program Panorama into the misuse of Global Fund aid to Cambodia has claimed that the Fund “watered down” a report released last month, which exposed a network of corruption in Cambodia’s health sector.

The Fund implicated two officials at the at the National Centre for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria Control and a procurement officer at the National Center for HIV/AIDS in bribery, and a World Health Organisation official in trading insider information with suppliers. It also found that documents at the charity Medicam had been falsified and staff positions invented.
But Panorama, which obtained a leaked copy of the original internal Global Fund investigation, reported yesterday that a number of allegations against Medicam did not make it into the final draft, including tens of thousands of dollars in imagined consultancy fees, thousands charged for hotels that were never used and allegedly falsified documents being found on the hard drive of its director, Dr Sin Sumony.

The Fund denied it attempted to water down the report.