Anatomy of a 'bribe'
The World Bank calls it a bribe, but consultant Seydou Idani says it's nothing more than a loan.
In 2004, the World Bank, a development bank controlled by 184 member countries, permanently barred Idani and his company in Burkina Faso—an impoverished nation in West Africa—from doing business with the institution. To understand how the bank came to debar Idani, U.S. News dissected several internal and public bank documents and spoke with people familiar with the investigation.
The 2004 annual report of the World Bank's investigative unit, known as the Department of Institutional Integrity, says internal bank auditors had informed the unit about irregularities on a bank-financed project. After a detailed investigation by the unit, "the bank terminated a staff member for accepting bribes from a consulting firm in exchange for influencing the retention of a consultant on a bank-financed project," it says. The investigation "established that the staff member, acting in the capacity of task manager, used a middleman to facilitate the transfer of illicit payments between the consultant and the staff member," says page 27 of the report.
While the annual report doesn't name the participants, people familiar with the investigation say the middleman described in the report was Seydou Idani; the consulting firm was an accounting firm, De Chazal Du Mee, based in the small island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean; and the staff member was Leslie Jean-Robert Pean.
Pean, a former midlevel manager at the World Bank, is now the subject of an investigation by federal prosecutors. An internal bank report details how Pean allegedly profited from his management of World Bank projects in Africa. Pean's lawyer describes the bank's allegations as "outrageous." (Please see the U.S. News story "Cleaning Up the Bank" for more about Pean and his lawyer's response.)
The bribe discussed in the annual report was in connection with a contract award given to DCDM on a World Bank-financed infrastructure project in Guinea Bissau, a small country in West Africa, according to an internal bank documents and people familiar with the investigation.
An internal investigative report says that Robin Harel, co-managing partner of DCDM, told investigators that in 1994 he met Idani in Burkina Faso and agreed to pay him 10 percent of the value of any contract he produced for the firm. Harel told investigators, as quoted in the report: "Idani must have told us that his fee would be shared with others because this is the way business is conducted in Africa." It was clear from the context of the comments, says the report, that Harel was referring to the need to make payments to government officials.
Harel said that in 1995 Idani "obtained" a $580,000 contract for DCDM to train entrepreneurs on the Guinea Bissau project. Almost immediately there were complaints about the poor quality of the training, the internal report says. In the midst of the complaints, witnesses told the bank that a DCDM partner gave $15,000 to Idani in 1996. "The circumstances and timing of the payment suggests very strongly that it was a bribe to retain the contract in the face of complaints about the quality of DCDM's work," it says. A DCDM accounting manager, according to the report, said the fee, paid in traveler's checks, was "unusual."
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