The team surrounding the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, freely admits he has taken a battering over the last year, mainly because of the investigation into the Iraq oil-for-food programme, writes Ewen MacAskill.
When he set up the investigation in April last year, he cannot have imagined that both he and the organisation he serves would be so severely criticised in the report published today.
He has been undermined mainly by the disclosures about the behaviour of his son, Kojo, whose former employer Cotecna was one of the successful bidders for one of the Iraq contracts.
In spite of the criticism, he says he is not planning to resign and intends to see out the remainder of his tenure, due to end in December next year.
But the investigation has left him weak and vulnerable. The UN summit next week, the biggest-ever meeting of world leaders, was supposed to be the high point of his stewardship of the UN as world leaders commit to meeting targets for poverty reduction and universal primary education for all. Instead, the summit will end up diluting the final document, mainly at the behest of the US, which opposes the financing of the development targets, objecting even to the term "millennium development goals".
The US administration is hostile to Annan, in part because of his comment to the BBC last year declaring the Iraq war illegal and partly because of his criticism of the US onslaught on the Iraqi-insurgent stronghold of Falluja.
The Iraq investigation was originally inspired by the US right as a way to undermine the UN, towards which it has long been hostile. Annan's team must have hoped that the investigation findings would have reached this conclusion. Instead, the investigators found that there was a foundation for the rightwing attack.
That said, there is another side to the story. The oil-for-food programme, for all its faults, provided an important service, alleviating some of the worst aspects of UN sanctions on the hard-pressed Iraqi population between 1996 and 2003.
As the former US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, once said of Iraq, but in another context, the corruption was a price worth paying.
Ewen MacAskill is the Guardian's diplomatic editor
