From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Wed Apr 18 2007 - 17:02:38 EDT
Patrick, The story was detailed also in the Wall Street Journal, on Monday 16 April. Wolfowitz had disclosed his relationship with Riza, and the Ethics Committee suggested that she should get another job elsewhere, that her pay would continue and that she would get a raise. Specifically, Ad Melkert advised Wolfowitz in a memo on July 27, 2005 that the possible disruption of the career prospects of the staff member could be valued on the basis of an "in situ promotion" based on her performance. In the same memo, Melkert advised Wolfowitz that he and the general councillor should communicate this straightaway to the vice-president of the personnel department, so that it could be implemented. Two weeks later Melkert made the same point again. But when he wrote Wolfowitz on 8 August, Melkert said that the Ethics Committee could not itself intervene directly in questions affecting staff members, and so he should get Xavier (the vice-president of personnel) to act on his instructions to settle the matter. On this basis, Melkert can claim that technically he had nothing to do with the size of the paypacket that Riza eventually got. Likewise, Wolfowitz can validly claim that he did exactly what the Ethics Committee told him to do. But Riza was paid far more that WB staff rules allow, on Wolfowitz's initiative, plus she failed to get WB approval for outside work as consultant to the defense contractor SAIC. The pro-Zionist Dutch writer Leon de Winter (adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute) claims that in reality the European donor countries and the top of the international aid mafia want Wolfowitz to go, because Wolfowitz wants to see results for WB activity, and carry through a restructuring which hurts their interests. www.elsevier.nl/opinie/weblog/asp/artnr/148157/weblogid/4/index.html But this is most probably not true. Everybody wants to see results for WB activity. Instead, it is Wolfowitz's complicity in the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan and his lack of experience as a banker that are the more likely objections. This was also the argument made by the FT: to do its job, the WB needs a credible figurehead, and if you have an apologist for mass murder and a liar as a leader then you don't get much credibility. Jurriaan
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