From Al Jazeera

A confidential UN report alleges that Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, his former foreign minister and an American law firm conspired to steal public funds by engaging in secret contracts that gave them hefty percentages from the country’s recovered overseas assets.

The report, obtained by Al Jazeera and presented to the UN Security Council in July, urges the UN to call on member states and financial institutions to freeze Somali assets under their jurisdiction until “a genuinely transparent and accountable recovery process can be established”.

“Continuation of a recovery process in secret … risks further exposure of overseas assets to misappropriation,” said the report, urging the Somali government to disclose the original list of identified assets, which now is only known to President Mohamud and the Maryland-based law firm Shulman Rogers as well as two other individuals.

The Somali government said it would only respond to the report in detail when it is officially released. Others accused of wrongdoing denied the allegations leveled against them.

Shulman Rogers dismissed the allegations as “false” and “malicious,” with Jeremy Schulman, the law firm’s man in charge of the Somalia project, saying, in a statement sent to Al Jazeera, that the report’s intention is “to discredit the Somali government, our law firm, and the individuals who have worked hard to support the asset recovery project for the people of Somalia”.

Jarat Chopra, the coordinator for Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group who presented the report to the UN Security Council’s sanction committee, said his group stands by its findings, but refused to comment further.

Read more at Al Jazeera