Wolfie on the ropes

Bank’s Report Says Wolfowitz Violated Ethics
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 14 — A World Bank committee charged Monday that Paul D. Wolfowitz violated ethical and governance rules as bank president by showing favoritism to his companion in 2005. In response, the Bush administration mounted a last-ditch global campaign to save Mr. Wolfowitz from being ousted from office.

On a day of rapid developments that intensified the furor over Mr. Wolfowitz at the bank, in the Bush administration and at government ministries around the world, the special committee that has investigated his conduct in the last month issued a scathing set of conclusions that seemed certain to hasten a decision on Mr. Wolfowitz’s fate.

The report charged that Mr. Wolfowitz broke bank rules and the ethical obligations in his contract, and that he tried to hide the salary and promotion package awarded to Shaha Ali Riza, his companion and a bank employee, from top legal and ethics officials in the months after he became bank president in 2005.

Citing what it said was the “central theme” of the matter, the report said Mr. Wolfowitz’s assertions that what he did was in response to the requests of others showed that “from the outset” of his tenure he “cast himself in opposition to the established rules of the institution.”

“He did not accept the bank’s policy on conflict of interest, so he sought to negotiate for himself a resolution different from that which would be applied to the staff he was selected to head,” the committee said, adding that this was “a manifestation of an attitude in which Mr. Wolfowitz saw himself as the outsider to whom the established rules and standards did not apply.”

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