Wolfowitz: Loathed by the World Bank board?

Richard Behar of Fox News has quite the scoop today: minutes of a World Bank board meeting (actually a Washington meeting of the board’s budget and “development-effectiveness” committees) seem to show a wholly dysfunctional relationship between the Bank's board and its management.

France’s alternate board director helped lead the assault, backed by the rep from Switzerland. The pair dismissed the management paper as a “lost opportunity.” A director from Mexico found the paper “confusing.” The directors or reps from Saudi Arabia, India, China, Canada, the United Kingdom and three other countries carped that it “fell short of its objective to establish a link between strategic priorities and budget allocation.” Australia, the Netherlands and France went even further, complaining that the Wolfowitz team “had not outlined a 'vision' for the bank linked to both a medium-and-long term outlook.”
And that view was echoed by Italy, Japan, Brazil, Mauritius and others, who concluded that the paper “simply provided a list of priority items without articulating criteria… or a rationale.”

Says Behar:

From the day he was nominated by President Bush, Wolfowitz was never warmly received by the bank’s board, which feared he would rock the boat that had been sailed more comfortably by his predecessor, James Wolfensohn — too comfortably, in view of the reform-minded Bush Administration. And the directors were right.

Behar is – unsurprisingly for a Fox News journalist – very sympathetic to the Wolfowitz cause. But even he realises that this level of mistrust between Wolfowitz and the board can't be good for anybody.

This story comes in the wake of news that Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-American Development Bank, is also having difficulty driving his institution while the board's hands remain firmly gripped on the steering wheel. Multinational Development Banks need a high level of political skill at the top. If Moreno, a hugely admired career diplomat, doesn't have it, the hopes for Wolfowitz would seem to be slim.

(Via FP)

Posted by Felix at 14:26 EST