By Raymond Colitt
from YAHOO! NEWS

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Healing the wounds and conflicts at the World Bank will be a difficult task in the aftermath of an ethics scandal, Robert Zoellick, the bank’s likely next president, said on Monday.

“My role as a potential CEO is to try to heal this institution, overcome some of the conflicts, the bruises, the wounding, the frustrations,” Zoellick told a news conference in the Brazilian capital at the end of a two-week tour through Africa, Europe and Latin America.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he said. “There’s a lot of build-up here.”

Zoellick, a former U.S. Trade Representative and Deputy Secretary of State, was nominated by the United States to lead the bank after Paul Wolfowitz was forced to resign last month over a high-paying promotion for his companion that exposed deep unhappiness among bank staff.

“It’s my hope that we can regain some momentum here by refocusing on the mission. The people (at the bank) are very committed to development,” Zoellick said. But he added that “there needs to be some humility too because we’ve seen the failure of many grand ideas.”

The bank’s board is expected to confirm Zoellick in the post this week after a deadline for nominations expired last Friday, leaving him the sole candidate.

He would take over with the World Bank in the throes of raising funds for its lending programs and in need of broad support from donor countries, notably in Europe.

There was special concern within the bank that European nations might withhold funding for development projects during Wolfowitz’s controversial tenure.

Several member countries, including Brazil, have also demanded greater transparency in the long’standing practice under which the United States picks the head of the bank and Europe chooses the leader of the International Monetary Fund.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush has chosen Robert Zoellick, a former U.S. trade representative, as the new president of the World Bank to replace Paul Wolfowitz, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday.

Bush plans to announce his selection on Wednesday and expects the bank’s board to accept it, the administration official said.

Bush had said he wanted an American to succeed Wolfowitz, despite increasing calls from World Bank member countries and some U.S. lawmakers to throw the process open to a global pool of candidates.

The controversy over Wolfowitz’s authorization of a hefty raise for his companion, Middle East expert Shaha Riza, deepened rifts among bank staff already discontented over his anti-corruption agenda and prompted sharp criticism from shareholder countries.

Wolfowitz also was controversial because of his role as a key architect of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq while serving in Bush’s Defense Department.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson received “positive reactions” from other countries to the choice of Zoellick, the administration official told reporters.

More at Reuters

He blames the media? Oh, that’s right. The media gave his girlfriend a huge raise. - JS

LONDON - Departing World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz in a radio interview broadcast Monday blamed an overheated atmosphere at the bank and in the media for forcing him to resign.

Wolfowitz, who has announced he will step down June 30, denied suggestions that his decision to leave was influenced by an apparent lack of support from the bank’s employees.

“I think it tells us more about the media than about the bank and I’ll leave it at that,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp. “People were reacting to a whole string of inaccurate statements and by the time we got to anything approximating accuracy the passions were around the bend.”

Wolfowitz said that he was pleased the bank’s board accepted that he had acted ethically, and in good faith in his handling of a generous compensation package for his girlfriend and bank employee Shaha Riza in 2005.

“I accept the fact that by the time we got around to that, emotions here were so overheated that I don’t think I could have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish for the people I really care about,” he said.

By tradition, the United States - the bank’s biggest financial contributor - names an American to run the institution.

Wolfowitz’s departure ends a two-year run at the development bank that was marked by controversy from the start, given his previous role as a major architect of the Iraq war when he served as the No. 2 official at the Pentagon.

I’ve been waiting for this. It will be interesting to see what happens here.

The departure of Paul D. Wolfowitz as World Bank president is prompting calls around the world to revoke the traditional right of the United States to select the institution’s leader.

As the White House asserted its claim on picking Wolfowitz’s successor, aid groups and former bank officials demanded that the next president be selected not in deference to the Bush administration, but on professional merits.

Advocacy groups and development experts took aim at an unwritten rule that has for six decades governed the financial institutions created in the aftermath of World War II: The U.S. president picks the World Bank chief, and Europe selects the head of its affiliate institution, the International Monetary Fund.

“Paul Wolfowitz’s problems at the World Bank stem in part from a widespread perception that he disproportionately represents U.S. interests rather than objectives that command a global consensus,” said a letter signed this week by more than 200 people, including heads of aid organizations, and sent to the executive boards of the World Bank and the IMF. The letter called for the traditional arrangement to be “abandoned and replaced with selection procedures that reflect two key principles: transparency of process, and competence of prospective leadership without regard to national origin.”

More at the Washington Post