Choose your own Wolfowitz adventure

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Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank’s struggling president, maintains he’s been wronged—that he and his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, are the victims of an orchestrated “smear campaign” aimed at ousting him for political, not ethical reasons. In recent days, he’s made a great show of trying to do his job and putting the controversy to rest.

Today, however, Wolfowitz discovered that this is easier said than done. At a Brussels conference on education in developing countries, the Bank president faced persistent questions about whether he did, in fact, wrongfully handle a pay raise and promotion for Riza. And Gordon Brown, the man who will succeed Tony Blair as Britain’s prime minister, clearly shunned the Bank president by not appearing with him at the podium.

But enough about the politics. What about the facts? Did Wolfowitz do anything wrong? It’s still an open question. Wolfowitz, Riza, and several other players in this drama have made formal statements this week to an ad hoc committee that is investigating the matter. In the interest of allowing our readers to make up their own minds, FP is making these documents available here for download in one convenient Microsoft Word file. No media filter; just the players writing (in some cases at great length, mind you) in their own words.

In the file are statements made to the ad hoc committee by the following individuals:

• Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank
• Roberto Dañino, former general counsel at the World Bank
• Shaha Ali Riza, former senior communications officer, MENA region
• Ad Melkert, former ethics committee chairman at the World Bank
• Shengman Zhang, former managing director of the World Bank 

So, what do you think? Email us with your comments.

UPDATE: Wolfowitz has responded (pdf) to the statements of Melkert and Dañino. Ed. note: The Word document linked above was modified to better reflect the order in which the statements were made. Since my copy of Wolfowitz’s rebuttal is a scanned PDF, I’ve had to leave it as a separate document.