'Ethics Case': Wolfowitz and woman

by Mark Silva

When Shaha Riza, girlfriend of then-incoming World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and an employee of the bank, was dispatched to work at the State Department in the fall of 2005 to avoid a "conflict of interest,'' she carried a bank salary of $180,000.

And since she moved on from the State Department to the Washington-based Foundation for the Future last year, still on the bank's payroll, bank documents show that, depending on possible pay-grade promotions, with a salary of $192,820 this year, she could be elligble to reach $209,480 or $244,960 by 2010 – "the difference at the end of five years is not insubstantial,'' the World Bank's human relations officer noted at the time she left bank headquarters.

It is Wolfowitz's hand in this arrangement which now has jeopardized the job of the World Bank president, the former deputy secretary of defense whom President Bush nominated for the bank presidency two years ago. Wolfowitz has said he is "sorry'' about his role in "negotiations'' about Riza's transfer to the State Department posting which he now acknowledges, "in hindsight,'' he should have 'kept myself out of.''

Amid calls for his resignation from inside and outside the bank, the World Bank has made an extraordinarily public disclosure of more than 100 pages of once confidential documents that reveal a cozy relationship between not only the president and his friend, but also the chairman of the Ethics Committee.