How Maurice Strong Runs The World
Profile: Maurice F. Strong
By PRANAY GUPTE
Special to the Sun
The Canadian business tycoon and self-styled socialist who's currently embroiled in a scandal relating to the United Nations, Maurice Strong, has created a worldwide network of influential people whom he's enlisted in the cause of environmentalism and "sustainable development," a phrase he claims to have coined to denote ecological security, economic progress, and social justice. But the 75-year-old Mr. Strong, a son of poor parents, has benefited through such networking, accumulating wealth and gaining status for himself and his friends.
A phrase frequently used in connection with Mr. Strong is "international man of mystery," and he has long occupied that zone where personal business interests are made to mesh with public-policy issues.
His leftist ideology, his political associations, and his platform for nearly four decades at the United Nations have enabled Mr. Strong to collaborate with companies and politicians he drew into the United Nations' ambit. Those who have tracked Mr. Strong's activities have called him "Chairman Mo," or "Max" — as in "maximum leader."
One member of that network is Prime Minister Martin, a liberal currently embroiled in a financial scandal in Canada. Before he became premier, Mr. Martin was co-chairman of a U.N. commission on Third World development. Mr. Strong had suggested the appointment to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who, when Mr. Martin acceded last year, became the first international leader to be the prime minister's official guest. Mr. Strong has said Mr. Martin and Mr. Annan have "a high degree of chemistry."
Mr. Martin has taken to using a favorite Strong term, "global equalization," a call for imposing global taxes on wealthy nations and distributing more money to poor countries under the auspices of the U.N. A few days ago, the political analyst Paul Foster, writing in Canada's National Post, asked: "Where, for example, might Mr. Martin have come up with the idea for 'global equalization,' which amounts to the fulfillment of The Communist Manifesto?"
Well before Mr. Martin became prime minister, he invested in a Strong company, Cordex Petroleums, the same enterprise that attracted $1 million from the North Korea-born Tongsun Park, a businessman who has been charged by federal authorities with bribing U.N. officials in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. Mr. Martin's investment came through a holding company he controlled, the CSL Group Inc., according to Mr. Strong's disclosures. Mr. Strong also invited in as a director William Hopper, who had served as head of Petro-Canada, the state oil company Mr. Strong founded in 1975, according to records. Mr. Strong was also the first chief executive of Petro-Canada, which has annual revenues of $3.7 billion and is listed on the Toronto and New York stock exchanges.
Another international figure with a debt to Mr. Strong is James Wolfensohn, out-going president of the World Bank. After Mr. Wolfensohn arrived in America from his native Australia, he worked at one point with Mr. Strong, according to Mr. Strong. Wolfensohn's campaign for the World Bank's presidency was organized by Mr. Strong, according to his friends, and enlisted the support of another Strong friend, Vice President Gore, to whom Mr. Strong donated more than $100,000 during the 1992 presidential race. Mr. Strong himself talked about his political donation to friends and colleagues.
One of Mr. Wolfensohn's first actions upon becoming World Bank head was to appoint Mr. Strong as a special adviser charged with recommending high-level appointments, among other things. His friends say that Mr. Strong then suggested several friends for lucrative jobs at the World Bank, including Mark Malloch Brown as Mr. Wolfensohn's spokesman.
Mr. Malloch Brown is now at the United Nations as chef de cabinet to Mr. Annan, to whom Mr. Strong had recommended the Briton. It was the second U.N. job Mr. Strong helped secure for Mr. Malloch Brown, the first being head of the U.N. Development Programme, which dispenses $1 billion in technical aid and grants to poor countries each year. Several Strong associates, including Nay Htun of Myanmar and Alicia Barcena of Mexico, have gotten highly paid consultancies or jobs in the U.N. system.
A former radio producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Anita Gordon, who is reported to be close to Mr. Strong, got a position as a communications officer at the World Bank, where she focuses on the environment. She's promoting the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty that Mr. Strong helped engineer as part of his advocacy of global treaties administered by the U.N. bureaucracy.
Still another Strong associate who's done well is Jim MacNeill, who became head of the environment department of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. Its director general, Donald Johnston, is another Canadian and another Strong ally. Mr. MacNeill went on to serve as secretary general of the so-called Brundtland Commission, named after its chairman, Gro Harlem Brundtland, then Norway's prime minister. Dr. Brundtland went on to become head of the World Health Organization, and her name often crops up as a possible successor to Mr. Annan.
Mr. Strong himself entertained the idea of seeking the top U.N. job in the 1990s and consulted informally with diplomats of many countries, but a quadruple-bypass heart operation at the Mayo Clinic prevented him from pursuing that quest more vigorously.
Mr. Strong was himself a member of the Brundtland Commission, which recommended that the United Nations convene the 1992 Conference on Environment and Development, more popularly known as the Earth Summit. Dr. Brundtland, an avowed socialist like Mr. Strong and Mr. MacNeill, lobbied one of Mr. Annan's predecessors, Javier Perez de Cuellar, to name Mr. Strong as the Earth Summit's secretary general, which is what happened. The summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, brought 110 world leaders, including President George H.W. Bush, and 50,000 environmentalists together for a three-week event that cost the United Nations more than $65 million.
With much fanfare, the leaders signed a document known as Agenda 21, a blueprint for a radical restructuring of the world order to promote sustainable development and alleviate poverty. Like most U.N. documents, it has mostly languished. (This reporter served as a press adviser to the Earth Summit between late 1991 and the middle of 1992. Mr. Strong supported the creation of a newspaper edited by this reporter, the Earth Times, but did not assist it financially.)
Another prominent figure closely allied with Mr. Strong is a former Colorado senator, Timothy Wirth. When the Democrat decided to leave the Senate after his first term, Mr. Strong sought to hire him as head of the Earth Council, an activist nonprofit organization that he had formed after the Rio Earth Summit. In the event, Mr. Wirth teamed up with another close Strong friend, Ted Turner, the founder of Cable News Network. Mr. Strong persuaded Mr. Turner to contribute $1 billion in stock to the United Nations' cause under the aegis of the U.N. Foundation, which Mr. Turner created in 1998. Mr. Strong has served on the foundation's board, and Mr. Wirth has been president of the Washington-based organization since its founding.
Among the beneficiaries of the U.N. Foundation's largesse have been a number of nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, associated with Mr. Strong. One of Mr. Strong's most trusted U.N. aides during the Earth Summit process, Jean-Claude Faby of France, has joined the foundation as head of its New York operations.
Yet another Strong aide, Nitin Desai of India — who was deputy secretary general of the Earth Summit — became head of a newly created Division for Sustainable Development, at the level of U.N. undersecretary-general. He retired last year, only to be taken on as a consultant to various U.N. commissions.
Mr. Desai's wife, Aditi, has not only worked for the U.N. Population Fund but has also represented Mr. Strong's Earth Council in New York. She is a close friend of his wife, Hanne Marstrand, a Dane. Mrs. Strong runs a New Age commune on the Strongs' 63,000-acre ranch in the San Luis Valley, at the edge of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in southern Colorado. She heads various entities there, including the Manitou Foundation, the Crestone project, and interfaith initiatives.
Born in 1929 at Oak Lane, Manitoba, Mr. Strong has been involved with the United Nations since the late 1940s, when he worked there briefly as a security guard. He returned to Canada to pursue entrepreneurship. At 25, he became vice president of Dome Petroleum. At 31, he became president of the Power Corp. of Canada. In cooperation with Lester Pearson, Mr. Strong founded and headed the Canadian International Development Agency. He befriended Mr. Pearson's successor as prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, whom he was eventually to nominate as an adviser to the United Nations.
Mr. Strong returned to the United Nations in the late 1960s, to organize what was to be the first of a three-decade-long series of global gabfests of the world body. That first event was the 1972 U.N. Conference on the Human Environment, in Stockholm. Its main sponsor was the late Olaf Palme, then Sweden's prime minister, a Strong friend, and a critic of American policy in Vietnam. It resulted in creation of the U.N. Environment Program, which he headed and established in Nairobi, where it operates under Klaus Toepfer, a former German environment minister and Strong protégé.
After the Earth Summit, Mr. Strong returned again to Canada to become chairman of Ontario Hydro at the invitation of a fellow socialist, Ontario's prime minister, Bob Rae. Again enlisting his friend Jim MacNeill, Mr. Strong developed several "sustainability" initiatives. Meanwhile, Ontario Hydro was faring poorly, and Mr. Strong cut 10,000 jobs.
But even while he was paring down the company, Mr. Strong considered the $12 million acquisition by Ontario Hydro of nearly 31,000 acres of forest land in Costa Rica, a purchase resisted by Costa Rica's Kekoldi Indians. "He is supporting Indians and conservation around the world and here he's doing the complete opposite," president of the Kekoldi Indian Association, Demetrio Myorga, told Canadian reporters at the time. Mr. Strong told critics the purchase was made on the basis that saving a large section of forest would help offset the emission of greenhouse gases by oil or coal-burning generating stations.
Around the same time, Mr. Strong was himself building a $35 million, 12-suit beach resort at Villas del Carib on the eastern coast of Costa Rica. The luxury hotel was built within the Gandoca-Manzillo Wildlife Refuge, where development is restricted, and the Kekoldi Indian Reserve, where the Indian Association must approve construction. Mr. Strong's company was called Desarrollos Ecologicos, ecological development in Spanish.
Indeed, Costa Rica has emerged as a something of a base for Mr. Strong. His Earth Council has its headquarters in the capital, San Jose. Costa Rica is also the site of the U.N.-sponsored University for Peace, of which Mr. Strong is chairman. And on its faculty are several of his aides from Earth Summit days.
Now Mr. Strong is promoting the adoption of an "Earth Charter." It's shaping up as a global constitution for the UN's 191 members. The ecologically-driven project is well funded by several foundations and left-leaning European governments. Maurice Strong's worldwide network always comes through for him.