ROME– Senior FAO officials convened an “emergency meeting” to discuss fall-out from the disclosure of blatant rigging of the agency’s high-profile Latin American communications job, FAO sources say.

 Moustachioed Chief of Corporate Communications Enrique Yeves met with Media Chief Mehdi Drissi and other senior media executives at the downtown Rome headquarters of the Food And Agriculture organisation after the Italian Insider disclosed last week how the media department rigged the appointment to the Santiago-based post of Juan José Toha, nephew of Santiago Mayor Carolina Toha, in order to curry favour with the Chilean Socialist Party, of which the Communications officer’s powerful aunt also is leader.

 Two highly qualified women, French national Margot Tedesco and Venezuelan Denise Martinez, were discarded to give lacklustre Senor Toha the job, breaking all the UN rules on employment according to gender, underrepresented nations and internal candidates.

 During what was termed an “emergency meeting,” the officials heard M. Drissi claim that documents relating to the appointment from which the Insider quoted had been “stolen” from his busy office at the agency.

 This came as no surprise to the meeting, given that the file on the affair had been left on his desk for months and was visible to anyone dropping by to chat with the talkative French Moroccan communications wizard, the sources said.

  The mood of the meeting was tense since Director General Jose Graziano da Silva was outraged that the stitch up of the women candidates had entered the public domain, striking a severe blow to his claim to transparent management of the agency.

 FAO watchers said the affair likely means that Senor Yeves will be passed over for the top job of overall chief of media with an even higher grade than his current highly-paid position. Mario Lubetkin, an unctuous Uruguayan journalist who heads the IPS news agency, is believed to be angling for the job previously held by the highly-respected former Reuter correspondent Nicholas Parsons, the sources said.

 The IPS recently moved its news operation into premises at the FAO in an unusual decision that observers said might throw into doubt its journalists’ capacity to write objectively about the UN agency’s activities.

 Senor Lubetkin is handicapped by his extremely poor spoken English but currently also works as Alternate Uruguayan Representative to the FAO, enjoying diplomatic and journalistic status simultaneously, the sources added.

 The meeting ended inconclusively. It evidently went without saying that FAO could not deny the well-documented story of Toha’s fixing, nor would it be politic to confirm it. Hence yet another important story about FAO would receive no reaction from the agency’s media team.

 Meanwhile however senior French Foreign Ministry officials at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris were studying the Insider reports on the scandal and were sure to confer with the French Ambassador to the FAO given that both M. Drissi and Mlle Tedesco are French nationals, diplomatic sources said.