LONDON-ITU Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi has been accused of “atrocious financial management” and threatened with dismissal, according to a report in the respected Swiss business magazine L’Hebdo. The revelations come just two weeks before the opening of the International Telecommunication Union’s four-yearly World Telecom show in Geneva and just two months before the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society, a heads of state meeting, also in Geneva, being organized by the ITU.
Whether the council, the group of member states responsible for ensuring the smooth running of the ITU, has the power or ability to remove a secretary-general remains to be seen. But it is clear that relationships between the council and Utsumi have broken down. Utsumi has been dismissive of the council’s expertise and is ignoring their demands for reform. In response, council is refusing to approve the ITU’s budget, citing lack of transparency in the ITU’s accounting systems, which could block the future operations of the organization. It’s become a standoff situation potentially embarrassing for Switzerland, the host country of the ITU.
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The Swiss authorities are adopting a neutral stance-in public at least. They may find it hard to continue with such restraint. Utsumi has invited the King of Spain to open the World Telecom event, a somewhat surprising choice given the precedent set by the presence of Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan at previous events, and intimated that Barcelona would be an excellent venue for World Telecom 2006.
But World Telecom 2003 is only one-third the size of the previous event and has lost the support of most of the industry’s major manufacturers. And even ITU staff members have expressed their concerns, holding a public demonstration to denounce the “catastrophic management” of the ITU.