As the World Bank meets today to decide the fate of its President, Paul Wolfowitz, the Bank’s report which throws the book at him for procuring a promotion for his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, to a State Department job plus compensation for losing her position at the Bank —a report which has been carefully leaked to make it hard for Wolfowitz to defend himself — is published. The BBC, like other media outlets, reported this as if the case against him was conclusive and all that remained was to watch him fall through the trap. The Wall Street Journal, however, which has said from the start that the case against Wolfowitz has been cooked up, continues its sterling work in exposing the evidence behind this kangaroo court that other media are failing to report:
But we’ve now seen two other documents that reveal the investigating committee’s clear bias against Mr. Wolfowitz. They concern its key witness, Xavier Coll, the bank’s vice president of human resources, who has joined those saying Mr. Wolfowitz dictated a raise he knew was excessive and then tried to cover it up. In his testimony, Mr. Coll claims that ‘there is no doubt that the President [Mr. Wolfowitz] knew or had been made aware of by me that this was outside the rules.’ The investigating panel relies heavily on Mr. Coll’s claims to support its findings against Mr. Wolfowitz.
But to reach that conclusion, the committee had to ignore a pair of August 2005 memos in which Mr. Coll told a very different story. Mr. Coll dictated those memos for his own files and marked them ‘Strictly Confidential and Personal–For Xavier Coll’s eyes only unless authorized explicitly by Xavier.’ They are a contemporaneous account of his negotiations with Ms. Riza and Mr. Wolfowitz.
In an August 22 memo, Mr. Coll reports that ‘I also felt that we were in a very difficult situation–with no precedent at the Bank–and that it had enormous potential to damage the Bank’s reputation. In balance, I thought that the situation required more flexibility than in other past cases and that there was great risk to the Bank if we could not come to a workable agreement in a few days.’ Yet the investigating panel now asserts that the situation wasn’t all that unusual and that Mr. Wolfowitz should have been allowed no such ‘flexibility’ in how he tried to settle the matter.
In the same memo, Mr. Coll also reports that he had urged a lump-sum settlement with Ms. Riza as she left the bank, and concedes that Mr. Wolfowitz ‘agreed that I should raise this alternative with Ms. Riza. . . . I felt comfortable that I raised my points of concern with the President and that he has taken these seriously and given due consideration.’ And regarding a later conversation Mr. Coll had with Ms. Riza, Mr. Coll wrote, ‘I indicated that while the President wanted to come to an agreement quickly (he was leaving that afternoon for an overseas trip) he also wanted to make sure that we came to the right solution, both for the institution and the staff.’ Mr. Coll added that Ms. Riza rejected his proposed ‘financial settlement.’
Only then did Mr. Wolfowitz decide to settle the matter by dictating its terms to Mr. Coll. After Mr. Coll recommended that any future raises for Ms. Riza should be contingent on a review of her work outside the bank by ‘a committee of her peers,’ Mr. Coll wrote that ‘this addition brought the process for potential promotions more in line with current practice at the Bank. I felt that, on balance, this was a reasonable way to move forward and find a solution given the very complex and difficult set of circumstances.’
Based on our fast reading late yesterday of the final investigating committee report, we could not find these quotes from Mr. Coll’s memos. Yet they clearly show that Mr. Coll thought at the time that Mr. Wolfowitz was trying his best to come to a fair conclusion that would not harm Ms. Riza, would protect the bank from any possible litigation, and would do well by bank rules.
