A hot seat for the World Bank's new president
In an interview, Cleveland said, "You don't always get to deliver good news in an organization with limited assets and limited budgets." She added "You are going to have people who question what your objectives are" and who "feel they have more experience than those of us who have never worked at the bank."
Critics have an important ally in the former No. 2 official at the bank, a man named Shengman Zhang. Zhang worked for Wolfensohn and left the bank last year to join Citigroup in New York City. Zhang, who was a powerful figure in the bank, never established a close relationship with Wolfowitz.
A Chinese national, Zhang rarely gives interviews but agreed to discuss Wolfowitz's stewardship in a series of telephone conversations with U.S. News. "The mood, the atmosphere, people are living in fear, almost like terror in the place," Zhang charged.
He went on to say that Wolfowitz's team is "operating like a government within a government to the exclusion of everybody else" and added, "I think they are clearly perverting the purpose of the place . . . [the bank needs] to be tougher on corruption, but this is a development organization. They are confusing being tough as being right."
Wolfowitz, informed of Zhang's comments, refused to be drawn into a fight. "Many of the best staff around here have commended Shengman to me as somebody who brought a certain order to this place that was badly needed," Wolfowitz said. "But I think it's unfortunate if people feel they need to fuss around in that way, and I don't have time for it."
For all the carping, the bank has been down this road before, the last time when Wolfensohn ran the place. Wolfensohn, an investment banker, took over as president in June 1995 and a year later began developing his anticorruption campaign.
Many bank staffers were aghast at his aggressive style, but Wolfensohn pushed ahead anyway, establishing an investigative operation to uncover corruption on bank-financed projects and within the bank itself; he also set up a sanctions committee to bar corrupt contractors from doing business with the bank.
Wolfowitz and his close advisers know this history, and perhaps that is why he doesn't seem too worried about all the griping.
"If you use the supertanker analogy, the bank is underway in more or less the right direction," he said in an interview. "The important thing is to pick up speed, not to get distracted from the main mission." When asked if he relied too much on his inner circle, Wolfowitz said that such criticism is "kind of silly." He said he also relies heavily on career bank staffers.
As recently as early this week, he sent a message to World Bank staff applauding it for its "dedication, commitment, and passion that you bring to our work."
–With Danielle Knight
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