June 14th 2007 | Sameer Dossani | More on Mr W's cronies, Wolfowitz | 3 Comments
Amid reports that the Volker Panel’s audit of Suzanne Rich Folsom’s INT is likely to be a whitewash, the Government Accountability Project is doing its own audit. more…
June 13th 2007 | Deep Insider | More on Mr W's cronies, Wolfowitz | 7 Comments
Now that disgraced about-to-be-former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz is about to draw his next-to-last paycheck from the World Bank, you’d expect that the cronies that helped him crash and burn would be planning their own departures.
Not so for “the other woman” Robin Cleveland, whose imperious and superficial role as Senior Counsellor (and whose rich pay of $275,000 tax-free dollars was a damn sight better than what she pulled down as a “third level official” at OMB) is scheming to join the Global Environment Facility. Or “burrowing in” as they say in the US government.
Robin is conniving with Monique Barbut, the lovely and charmant Chief Executive of the enormous global fund for the environment that is housed in the Bank “investing in our planet”, to keep her excessive and unwarranted salary for another two years as a “team leader”
Have neither of them any shame? more…
June 11th 2007 | Sameer Dossani | More on Wolfowitz | 1 Comment
In this insightful Salon.com piece on Bush administration figures who’ve written in support of former Cheney advisor Lewis “Scooter” Libby (you have to go through their ‘click on sponsor’ page), Sydney Blumenthal offers this damning insight on the lengthiest of those letters of support, written by World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz: more…
June 7th 2007 | Sameer Dossani | More on Wolfowitz, Zoellick | 34 Comments
OK, confession time. I grew up in a World Bank household. My mother started working there when I was two; my father joined the International Finance Corporation when I was four. As a child I heard snippets of conversation about West African travels and poverty around the world. I also picked up talk of “golden handshakes” and benefits such as my own private school education being subsidized by the Bank. At some later point, I hope to capture a lot of these contradictions in a book. At the moment, it’s worthwhile asking whether these benefits and high salaries are necessary for an institution that claims to be about “poverty reduction”. In this article, Wolfowitz’s Golden Parachute, I look at Wolfowitz’s attempt to take these policies to an extreme, and argue that it’s time to end the hypocrisy.
June 6th 2007 | Deep Insider | More on Mr W's cronies, Riza, Wolfowitz | 3 Comments
Paul Wolfowitz’s surprising–and seemingly ineffective–character reference for his protégé Scooter Libby, read to a captivated court at Libby’s sentencing hearing, should remind us of the unfinished HR business at the Bank. Nominee Robert Zoellick launches his worldwide listening tour and charm tour, but let’s not forget the housecleaning that everyone’s anticipating to get them, and the post-Wolfowitz Bank, back to work.
Reread Voice of Reason’s May 14 “watch what Shaha Riza and Paul Wolfowitz do, not what they say.” This insightful piece during the drama put some context around Shaha’s career at the Bank. Her contribution was not, ahem, quite as Paul Wolfowitz believed, and would have had the Board believe. His handling of his lover’s career was the incident that helped unravel his deeply flawed presidency.
Shaha is desperately negotiating her return to the Bank now that the conflict of interest–Wolfowitz–is about to be removed. It’s not finished, though, until the Bank and State complete their investigations into Bank employee Shaha’s jaunt to Iraq, apparently as an employee of defence contractor SAIC.
It now seems that it was apparently Shaha advising Wolfowitz not to resign and how to handle the Board and others so aggressively right up to the end. We always thought it was Robin Cleveland (banished to a broom closet but still very much on Bank premises) but it was just as much Shaha all the way along. more…
May 30th 2007 | Sameer Dossani | More on Wolfowitz | Comments Off
As many of us suspected, European countries agreed not to challenge the U.S. “divine right of appointing” as part of the bargain that saw Wolfowitz resign, according to Canada’s Globe and Mail. This line in the article on Zoellick caught my attention: more…
May 29th 2007 | Sameer Dossani | More on Wolfowitz | Comments Off
[Apologies in advance for the shameless self promotion.] The Scripps Howard News Service has picked up an op-ed I wrote with editorial help from the good folks at Foreign Policy In Focus. more…
May 28th 2007 | A Washington source | More on Wolfowitz | Comments Off
In a hearing by the House Committee on Financial Services last Tuesday about ” The Role and Effectiveness of the World Bank in Combating Global Poverty “, Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz argues for appointing an “Interim President, for the next 20 to 24 months” more…
May 28th 2007 | Alex Wilks | More on Wolfowitz | Comments Off
Paul Wolfowitz has given an exclusive interview to the BBC World Service to try to explain why he is leaving the World Bank. He says the media and an overheated atmosphere were to blame, and uses his airtime to justify his record at the Bank in general and on the Riza affair. He refuses to be drawn on how his successor should be chosen but agrees that African countries are “under-represented” at the Bank. more…
May 26th 2007 | Voice of Reason | More on Wolfowitz | Comments Off
The Staff Association, which has emerged as the Bank’s own “civil society” has circulated Managing Director Graeme Wheeler’s strong and sensitive statement to the Bank Board’s Personnel Committee. Beyond highlighting the huge emotional cost the Wolfowitz Situation imposed on Bank staff, it hints at a few short-term changes that must be made in important personnel and policy processes. These are: the reporting relationship of the Bank’s Institutional Integrity Department, and the selection process for the next Vice President, Human Resources. Both are thought to have been captured by Wolfowitz cronies. more…
