UN report details 'systematic looting' by South Sudan's rulers as citizens went hungry

NAIROBI (Reuters) -U.N. investigators on Tuesday accused South Sudanese authorities of plundering their country's wealth, including by paying $1.7 billion to companies affiliated with Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel for road construction work that was never done. The payments from 2021 to 2024 were just one example of "grand corruption" in the impoverished nation, according to the report by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, where average gross domestic product per capita is now a quarter of what it was at independence in 2011. The report cites an annual budget allocation to the president's medical unit that exceeded health spending across the entire country.