Kristalina Georgieva on a tightrope: the IMF’s board will meet again this Sunday to assess the situation of its director questioned

In a process that seemed to have been postponed Friday after the Annual Meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which opens Monday in Washington, The IMF’s board will meet again this Sunday with the institution’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, and law firm WilmerHale, who says Georgieva lobbied World Bank staff to he modifies the data for the benefit of China while being the executive director of this organization.Reuters reported, citing “sources familiar with the plan.”

According to the international agency, “the earliest there would be a decision on Georgieva’s future would be on Monday, when finance ministers and other officials from many of the IMF’s 190 member countries meet in Washington for the meetings. fall annuals of the IMF and the World Bank. ”.

This Friday, the IMF board debated the issue for five hours before adjourning the meeting and asking for more “details”, which could be resolved this Sunday, after the executive directors have listened to and collated the explanations. of both parties.

From scandal to eclipse

The scandal threatens to overshadow high-level meetings on the global economy, the Covid-19 pandemic and global tax issues, in discussions to be held in part in person, along with other online gatherings.

Georgieva has vehemently denied the allegations, which date back to her actions when she was the World Bank’s COO.. The lawyer for the current IMF director claims that the investigation by law firm WilmerHale violated the Bank’s staff rules by denying them the opportunity to respond to the charges, which the firm denied, which was hired by the agency itself to investigate the allegations. irregularities in two editions of the annual “Doing Business” report, a sort of control of competitiveness and the business climate in some 190 countries around the world.

Separately

Lawyers for Georgieva and WilmerHale will appear separately before the fund’s board of directors, the sources told Reuters on condition of anonymity. In contrast, there was no comment from Georgieva, who even hired a PR firm, SKDK, to defend itself publicly, or the study that produced the damning report.

Essentially The charge is that Georgieva pressured, through Simeon Djankov, a compatriot, and other senior officials, the team responsible for preparing the report, to secure a better position for China, which has gone from position 82 in the first versions to position 75 in the final version of “Doing Business 2018”, which was published on October 31 of the same year.

The manipulation, the report said, responded to pressure from Chinese government officials. In the context of a strategic confrontation between Washington and Beijing, these are accusations of enormous political weight, to the point that three US congressional lawmakers, two Republicans and one Democrat, asked the US Treasury to study the matter comprehensively and also investigate Georgieva’s relationship with Chinese officials already in her role as managing director of the IMF .

On Friday, the Italian, German and British governments joined the position initially held by France to support the prosecution of Georgieva, but the position of the United States, the Fund’s largest shareholder, was not known. A European fear would be that faced with this new misstep by a European official at the head of the IMF, the United States would seek to appoint an American to this post.

Since 1946, when the World Bank and the IMF were created, a North American has always been appointed to head the first (there has been no woman at the head of this institution) while a European has always was appointed head of the Fund, as was the case with the last two directors, the French Christine Lagarde and the Bulgarian Georgieva.

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