Rocky tenure as Wolfowitz often clashed with staff

As he prepared to sign a five-year contract as World Bank president in the spring of 2005...

As he prepared to sign a five-year contract as World Bank president in the spring of 2005, Paul Wolfowitz sent his personal lawyer, Robert Barnett, to negotiate the terms. Barnett, whose high-profile clients have included some of Washington’s biggest political and media figures, did not mince words in his meetings with the bank’s legal team.

Wolfowitz wanted more than a dozen amendments to the standard contract that had served the institution for decades, Barnett told them, including special dispensation for the books he would write and the paid speeches he planned to deliver, and a salary on par with that of the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who was traditionally more highly paid.

Beginning with his 2005 appointment as World Bank president, Paul D Wolfowitz has stirred criticism and controversy at the institution.

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A final sticking point, conveyed in an e-mail to then-general counsel Roberto Dañino, was Wolfowitz’s insistence that, while he had earlier offered to recuse himself from all office matters involving bank employee and his girlfriend Shaha Riza, he insisted on retaining “professional contact” with her — something that the executive board later determined was a clear conflict of interest under personnel rules. The Riza issue has come back to haunt Wolfowitz.

Testy exchanges and peremptory demands quickly came to characterise Wolfowitz’s dealings with the institution’s staff and governors on a range of issues during his presidency, according to senior bank officials.

Wolfowitz has clashed with the staff over pay packages and authority he gave to aides Robin Cleveland and Kevin Kellems, whom he brought to the bank from the White House, installed in senior positions and rewarded with open-ended contracts and quarter-million-dollar, tax-free salaries, despite their lack of development experience.

Both staff and management also have raised concerns over what several described as Wolfowitz’s insistence that the bank accelerate its lending to Iraq and open an office there.

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A principal architect of the Iraq war as deputy defence secretary during President Bush’s first term, Wolfowitz has pressed the issue in the bank against strong concerns about security and poor governance in Iraq. “He was pretty aggressive about it, given that he’s generally a mild-mannered person. He was really quite hard,” said one source. “I don’t know how much of it was flogging for the (Bush) administration rather than his own convictions.”

–Karen DeYoung