It looks pretty bad for Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank. The Guardian reports the reaction yesterday when he tried to address Bank staff in their headquarters atrium:
Attempting to address around 200 World Bank employees gathered in the atrium of the bank’s plush Washington headquarters yesterday afternoon, Mr Wolfowitz quickly left after a knot of staff began chanting “resign, resign” while others also hissed and booed.
One staff member who was in the atrium said: “To see the bank’s president being heckled by his own staff was amazing. He looked shocked, very shocked, by the reaction and the anger.”
And the FT has a strongly worded editorial calling on him to resign too:
What then do we see here? The answer is: an apparent violation of Bank rules; favouritism that borders on nepotism; and a possible cover-up. It is true Mr Wolfowitz and Ms Riza were put in a difficult position. Even so, what has come out would be bad in any institution. In an institution that spear-heads the cause of good governance in the developing world, it is lethal.
The World Bank has moved from being a self-proclaimed exemplar of best practice in corporate governance to an example of shoddiness. As long as Mr Wolfowitz stays, this can be neither repaired nor forgotten, be it outside the Bank or inside it. In the interests of the Bank itself, he should resign. If he does not, the board must ask him to go.
One day to go until the Bank’s spring meetings. The drama…
