Washington (AFP)
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva lobbied in 2017 to modify a report from the World Bank, where she was stationed at the time, in order to spare China, says an independent investigation commissioned by the international institution and made public Thursday.
Ms. Georgieva said she "disagreed" with the conclusions of this investigation, whose authors interviewed dozens of employees, current and former, and sifted through 80,000 documents.
Faced with these revelations, the World Bank has announced that it is stopping the publication of its annual "Doing Business" report - it is the one for 2018 that is accused here.
She said she was working on a "new approach to assess the business and investment climate".
China had, in 2017, not appreciated its 78th place in the "Doing Business" report of the Bank.
To prevent him from falling further in the ranking of the following year, and to obtain his signature in sensitive negotiations, the Washington-based institution has used great means, according to an investigation by the law firm WilmerHale, requested by the committee of the World Bank.
It shows that "pressure - direct and indirect" has been exerted by senior officials in President Jim Yong Kim's office - "presumably at the latter's request" - to change China's ranking.
And shortly before the publication of the 2018 edition, Kristalina Georgieva, at the time Managing Director of the World Bank, according to the survey requested the adaptation of the methodology and the modification of the criteria.
Mrs. Georgieva would have reprimanded a senior official of the institution for "having mismanaged the Bank's relations with China and not having appreciated the importance of the Doing Business report for the country", according to the survey.
Under pressure, his teams would then have changed some data, and allowed China to keep its 78th place instead of falling to 85th.
The official reprimanded, he was praised for having "done his part of the work for multilateralism".
- "Destructive policies" -
"The report speaks for itself", simply reacted to a spokesperson for the Bank.
Kristalina Georgieva, who took over as IMF head in October 2019, said on Thursday that she "strongly disagrees with the findings and interpretations" of this survey "with respect to (her) role in the" 2018 report.
"I have already held a meeting with the Board of Directors of the IMF on this subject," she added in this statement sent to AFP.
Jim Yong Kim in Beijing on November 6, 2018 THOMAS PETER POOL / AFP
The stopping of the "Doing Business" report was hailed by Nadia Daar, head of Oxfam International in Washington, saying that this classification "encourages (ed) governments to adopt destructive policies which worsen inequalities".
The US Treasury told him to analyze the report, citing "worrying conclusions".
"Our primary responsibility is to preserve the integrity of international financial institutions," the finance ministry said in a statement.
The changes in the ranking methodology had, in January 2018, prompted the resignation of the former chief economist of the World Bank, Paul Romer, nobelized a few months later.
The World Bank at the time denied any political influence in this ranking.
- "toxic" culture -
The negotiations underway during the drafting of the 2018 ranking concerned the historic increase of 13 billion dollars in the resources of the World Bank, the signing of which required the support of US President Donald Trump (who had opposed concessional loans to China) but also from Beijing, which had agreed to pay more for the loans.
Simeon Djankov, an official named in the investigation, had publicly spoken out against organizations that questioned other aspects of the report, including the implicit stance in favor of lower corporate taxes.
He even called them "Marxists" at a conference in 2019.
Law firm WilmerHale also investigated the 'Doing Business of 2020' report concerning Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but said it could not find any evidence that management was involved. in data changes.
The people questioned finally reported a "toxic" culture within the team in charge of the "Doing Business" report, in particular on the part of Simeon Djankov, who was then an advisor to Kristalina Georgieva.
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