As he turned 24, Michael Soussan contemplated suicide. A high-minded Danish-born graduate living in New York, he had found himself working for the public-affairs lobbyist Jack Abramoff and was full of self-disgust at his own success in schmoozing politicians on behalf of big business.

Instead of killing himself, he quit, a good move in more than one sense: Abramoff was subsequently convicted of corrupting public officials, while Soussan landed the job of his dreams, working for the United Nations on the biggest aid programme it had ever attempted.

However, anyone familiar with the tales of Soussan's fellow countryman Hans Christian Andersen will expect dark truths to emerge from the most apparently innocent exteriors - and so it turns out. The UN programme was designed to deliver so-called humanitarian aid to the people of Iraq through supervised sales of that country's oil - otherwise known as oil-for-food. As we now know, this rapidly became a scam of gigantic proportions, which gave billions to Saddam Hussein and to the companies prepared to conspire with him to evade the rules supposedly invigilated by the UN. The victims, as ever, were the people of Iraq.

To young Soussan, who joined the United Nations in 1997 with an idealism bordering on veneration, this was a shattering experience. Yet even to cynics of multinational aid this book will come as a revelation. If you had thought the UN to be a dysfunctional, disorganised and dishonest organisation worth much less than the sum of its parts, think again: Soussan's story shows that it's much worse than that.

At the heart of the corruption of oil-for-food was a relatively simple operation. The crude-oil prices stated on the contracts were manipulated to skim a profit for the companies who sold the oil on behalf of the Iraqis. The Iraqis in turn got them to over-invoice for the cost of “humanitarian” supplies, thus providing Saddam and his equally disgusting henchmen with dollars galore.

Although Soussan can be described as a whistle-blower, his own role in all of this was not entirely innocent. Quite early on, Soussan receives a query from a Swiss magistrate puzzled by the fact that he is being asked to set up a contract for a “front” company (that is, one deliberately created to disguise the identity of the person behind the company) to handle one of the oil-for-food transactions: the use of such front companies was illegal under the terms agreed by the UN's Security Council. The Russians are the biggest beneficiaries of the scamming, profiting to the extent of $500m, some of which went directly to then President Putin's chief of staff (for subsequent disbursement to favoured politicians). Surprise, surprise, the UN official assigned to such legal issues is Russian. He tells Soussan that the Swiss magistrate's conscientious inquiry should be ignored - advice that our author goes along with, albeit with theatrically expressed misgivings.

After that, the use of front companies escalates out of all control. Some of the biggest personal beneficiaries turn out to be French officials attached to that nation's foreign ministry - which may help in retrospect to explain France's wholehearted sabotaging of Bush and Blair's attempt to gain UN support for the removal of Saddam by military means: not only would a switch from the sanctions policy put an end to the French profits from it, but if Saddam's ministries ever did fall to the Americans there might be some extremely embarrassing documents to be found in them.

As it happened, the Americans were so unforgivably blasé in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad that they made no attempt to secure any of the ministry buildings, which were duly looted. It was not until January 2004 that the truth was revealed, when Al-Mada, an independent Baghdad newspaper, produced what it said was the full list of those it claimed had benefited illicitly from the oil-for-food programme, having been handed the key documents retrieved from the looted oil ministry. George Galloway successfully sued The Daily Telegraph over its claim that the appearance of his name in these documents was evidence that the Scots MP personally benefited from his cordial relationship with the late Saddam Hussein. Doubtless, Soussan's publishers will have had their lawyers scrutinise carefully the passages that relate to Galloway in this book: not so carefully, however, that they were able to prevent Soussan referring to him as an “Englishman”. I imagine that Galloway will be outraged by such a slur, although even such an experienced litigant as the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow might find it difficult to make this particular unfounded accusation a cause for action.

If there is a “Mr Big” in Soussan's book, that man is Benon Sevan, the Armenian-Cypriot UN under-secretary-general responsible for the administration of the oil-for-food programme. Soussan found the colourful, profane Sevan a strangely likeable character, and was in turn treated almost like a son by the UN potentate known to his staff as “Pasha”. That, presumably, is why the author never questioned at the time why Sevan would make unexplained visits to Opec meetings or shoo his official note-taker (one Michael Soussan) out of the room when a mysterious Iraqi known as “The Bumblebee” came for a little chat.

It turned out, of course, that the UN man in charge of the oil-for-food “humanitarian aid” was himself one of the illicit skimmers. Sevan slipped out of New York just before he was accused by an official investigation of having “corruptly benefited” from the programme he supposedly administered for the benefit of the Iraqi people. The retired Sevan now lives in northern Cyprus, which has no extradition treaty with America, and is still receiving his UN pension.

Yet it would be wrong to see Sevan as the villain of the piece, and Soussan is right not to do so. His tale is one of a profound institutional corruption, infinitely more significant than that of any single individual. The next time you hear anyone mention the United Nations and moral authority in the same sentence, tell them to read this book.

Backstabbing for Beginners by Michael Soussan
Nation £15.99 pp352

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