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Wolfowitz Resigning - World Bank on the Change
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Someone from the US is generally in charge of the World Bank whereas someone from Europe is in charge of the IMF. That's generally how it works for the two major international financial bodies. When the US president looses confidence (among other things and people) in the president of the WB, thigns have to change. Paul Wolfowitz has tendered his resignation as president of the World Bank. After a two-year run he's out; maybe he'll return to the problems in Iraq since he was a major figure in the Iraq war when he served as the No. 2 official at the Pentagon.
In the end, it was problems with shady payouts and mistresses that caused most of the uproar.The WB's board that he did not bear sole responsibility for the conflict-of-interest furor surrounding his handling of the 2005 pay package for his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, a bank employee.
The controversy, which gripped the bank for a month, was seen as a growing liability that threatened to tarnish the poverty-fighting institution’s reputation and hobble its ability to persuade countries around the world to contribute billions of dollars to provide financial assistance to poor nations. Maybe because there's an agenda? And it's not in the interest of the poor countries?
The United States is the bank’s largest shareholder and its biggest financial contributor. The WB board has pledged to review the World Bank’s ethics policies, noting that “the bank’s systems did not prove robust to the strain under which they were placed.”
European nations had led the charge for Wolfowitz to resign. Those calls were backed by many on the bank’s staff, former bank officials, aid groups and some Democratic politicians.
Among those mentioned as a possible replacement for Wolfowitz are former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who was Bush’s former trade chief; Robert Kimmitt, the No. 2 at the Treasury Department; Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson; former Republican Congressman Jim Leach and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Stanley Fischer, who once worked at the International Monetary Fund and is now with the Bank of Israel.
The 185-nation World Bank, created in 1945 to rebuild Europe after World War II, provides more than $20 billion a year for projects such as building dams and roads, bolstering education and fighting disease. The bank’s centerpiece program offers interest-free loans to the poorest countries.
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econmod
Broker
/ Moderator
May 18, 2007, 12:05 AM
Post #1 of 1
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