Washington – Fighting to keep his job, World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz issued a rebuttal Thursday that blamed unclear bank rules for creating questions about his handling of hefty pay raises for his girlfriend.
The rebuttal comes as a special bank panel is putting together a report on whether Wolfowitz acted properly in the arranging the 2005 promotion and compensation package for bank employee Shaha Riza. The panel’s findings and recommendation will go to the bank’s 24-member board, which ultimately will decide Wolfowitz’s fate.
The bank’s former top ethics official, Ad Melkert, told the panel this week that the bank’s ethics committee was not consulted and did not approve of Riza’s compensation package.
The bank’s former general counsel, Roberto Danino, said he believed Wolfowitz acted “incorrectly.”
“Rather than attempt to adjudicate between our conflicting interpretations of the events that occurred here, the board should recognize that this situation is the product of ambiguous bank rules and unclear governance mechanisms,” Wolfowitz wrote Thursday to the special panel’s chief, Herman Wijffels.
Wolfowitz has maintained that he acted in good faith and did not try to hide information about the package from bank officials.
He has said the package’s details were not dictated by him but rather “flowed from the back-and-forth negotiating process” between the bank’s human resources head and Riza, who had her own counsel.
The bank’s ethics officials, he said, had access to all the details of the package if they wanted them.
Riza had worked for the poverty-fighting institution when Wolfowitz arrived in 2005. She was moved to the State Department to avoid a conflict of interest but stayed on the bank’s payroll. Her salary went from close to $133,000 to $180,000. With subsequent raises, it eventually rose to $193,590.
