Washington – World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz decried what he called a “smear campaign” against him Monday and told a bank panel that he had acted in good faith in securing a promotion and pay raise for his girlfriend. He said had no plans to resign, and President Bush gave him a fresh endorsement.
In a statement prepared for the panel, Wolfowitz said the institution’s ethics committee had access to all the details surrounding the arrangement involving bank employee Shaha Riza, “if they wanted it.”
Wolfowitz told the panel, “I acted transparently, sought and received guidance from the bank’s ethics committee, and conducted myself in good faith in accordance with that guidance.”
The special bank panel is investigating how Wolfowitz handled the 2005 promotion and pay package of Riza, who was reassigned from the World Bank to duties at the State Department to avoid a conflict of interest.
Riza, who appeared before the panel late in the day, said she didn’t want to move in the first place and wasn’t satisfied with the arrangement.
“I continue to believe that I should not have been asked to leave and that I was unjustly treated for reasons that I had no control over and still do not understand,” she said in a statement to the panel. She also defended her pay.
“I should not be singled out for isolated finger-pointing when my salary level is within the same range as staff in my grade level who were not forced to leave their jobs,” Riza said. She said the “media circus” over the issue has done “significant harm to my career, my personal well- being and my prospects to continue the work I love.”
The controversy has led to calls for the resignation of Wolfowitz, who was an architect of the Iraq war in his previous job at the Pentagon. The bank’s 24- member board is expected to make a decision this week.
Bush, meanwhile, said Wolfowitz “ought to stay. He ought to be given a fair hearing.”
Wolfowitz contended that the controversy over the pay package was part of an effort to oust him from the office, which he has held for nearly two years. The institution’s mission is to fight global poverty.
“The goal of this smear campaign, I believe, is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that I am an ineffective leader and must step down for that reason alone, even if the ethics charges are unwarranted,” Wolfowitz said.
Wolfowitz said the details of Riza’s pay package “were not ‘dictated’ by me but flowed from the back-and-forth negotiating process” between the bank’s vice president of human resources, Xavier Coll, and Riza, who had her own counsel.
Riza said that during negotiations on her package, neither Coll nor anyone else suggested that it might violate bank policy.
