The Wall Street Journal-20080117-World Bank-s Anticorruption Chief Resigns
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080117
World Bank's Anticorruption Chief Resigns
WASHINGTON -- The head of the World Bank's anticorruption unit resigned, reflecting continuing turmoil at the poverty-fighting institution over how best to deal with corruption.
Suzanne Rich Folsom decided to leave to take a job in the private sector, said a World Bank spokesman, who added that Ms. Folsom wanted to spend more time with her family.
Ms. Folsom has been a lightning rod in a battle at the institution over how best to deal with corruption since she was appointed to the job in 2005 by then World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. He resigned last year.
To many at the bank, Ms. Folsom was seen as a Wolfowitz partisan who unfairly targeted World Bank staff as complicit in corruption and helped steer the institution down a self-defeating path of emphasizing anticorruption measures at the expense of development. To her supporters, she was unfairly taking the heat by trying to change a hidebound organization that paid little more than lip service to weeding out graft. Ms. Folsom declined to comment about her job shift.
The battle over her role continued well beyond Mr. Wolfowitz's departure. In September, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who headed a review of Ms. Folsom's Department of Institutional Integrity, or INT, gave her generally high marks for professionalism. But the Volcker report recommended that some of INT's authority be shifted to other parts of the bank. That led to a loss of support for Ms. Folsom among some investigators who felt that she didn't fight hard enough for the department to retain its jurisdiction.
The World Bank's new president, Robert Zoellick, didn't fully embrace Ms. Folsom. While he said he wanted her to stay on, he didn't adopt Mr. Volcker's recommendation that the head of INT be made a vice president, a higher rank than Ms. Folsom held. Ms. Folsom had been widely criticized for holding two jobs under the Wolfowitz regime -- running the antigraft unit and dispensing political advice as Mr. Wolfowitz's counselor.
Recently, the INT finished and released one of its most ambitious reports, which alleged "serious incidents of fraud and corruption" in $570 million of health projects it has funded in India. The internal review launched in 2006 turned up wrongdoing in five projects dating as far back as 1997, including efforts to curb malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis.
