A committed long-term serving United Nations senior staff, Mr. Anthony O’Mullane, Director at the D-2 level in the Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT), is facing a malicious scheme to marginalize and ostracize him under the pretext of the illustrious “restructuring exercise” in retaliation for having denounced financial irregularities in the UN Secretariat.
Once a senior staff member dares to denounce another one, in this case, the Controller (whose position in the United Nations is untouchable), the United Nations war machines will be unleashed upon him. In Mr. O’Mullane’s case, his crime was that he dared to question financial irregularities, a duty entrusted to him as a senior staff of the Organization.
He also dared to file appeals against OIOS and the Controller.
And so the Secretary-General’s war machine was launched.
First, a restructuring exercise must be hastily prepared and documented through various piles of memoranda and Excel sheets to preempt any possible subsequent allegation of retaliation and to liken the shady exercise to a legitimate one before the UN Dispute Tribunal.
Second, instructions are promptly communicated to OIOS not to initiate any fact-finding or investigations into Mr. O’Mullane’s complaints despite the seriousness of his allegations of “possible noncompliance of the United Nations Controller with United Nations financial rules and regulations” and the second one relating to “harassment and abuse of power.”
Judgments on the two appeals are unlikely to see the light before the end of 2024/2025.
In the meantime, the Secretary-General’s management team and legal counsels aim to tighten the leash on Mr. O’Mullane.
He will be reassigned, marginalized, hammered, pressured, and finally shown the door under yet another Non-Disclosure Agreement.
A staff member must satisfy three cumulative requirements for interim measures to be granted. As it happens, the staff member cannot even succeed in proving the first requirement, which is to demonstrate the particular urgency of the case.
Reviewing all the jurisprudence since 2010, the Tribunal has rarely granted a motion for interim measures simply because its requirements are unattainable for any staff member, and the threshold is too complex to reach.
The legal counsels know this and use it to the Secretary-General’s advantage.
In Mr. O’Mullane’s case, the Secretary-General’s legal counsels had only to draft one sentence to convince the duty judge to reject the motion for interim measures:
They referred to an email trail to show that internal restructuring discussions had already been taking place since at least late 2022 while the appeals of Mr. O’Mullane were filed in July 2023. In other words, the Judge said that
“the restructuring plan was initiated before the filing of the applications. The fact that the restructuring exercise, including the reassignment of the Applicant, has been under discussion for many months tends to show that this is a matter of self-inflicted urgency. The Tribunal therefore concludes that the Applicant has failed to show that this is a case of particular urgency.”
And so it goes.
The case is disposed of in less than one argument.
The urgency is self-inflicted!
As if all staff members do not know by now the maneuvering of senior management and their restructuring exercise. There is no case of an appeal filed before a restructuring exercise simply because the staff member does not have the deceitful, secretive restructuring plans that aim to eliminate them in the first place.
By the time Mr. O’Mullane proves the unlawfulness of this restructuring exercise and the retaliation and harassment against him, he will have been ousted or, at best, completely isolated.
Enough of disposing of dedicated senior staff like you would dispose of expired merchandise on shelves.
Mr. Secretary-General, your People are at the Core of the United Nations.
Without them, the United Nations will disintegrate.
The principles of adversarial fairness and transparency require that staff members demand that the Secretary-General immediately order an independent investigation to look into Mr. O’Mullane’s allegations of financial irregularities and the claims of harassment and retaliation against him.
