WASHINGTON Reuters : The chief of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, said Wednesday that she did not expect a data-rigging scandal surrounding her former employer, the World Bank, to hamper decades of close collaboration between the two institutions.
On Monday, WilmerHale, cleared of wrongdoing in the matter, had sharply criticized a report prepared by law firm Georgieva for the IMF and his decision to publish its findings.
The law firm's investigative report alleged that Georgieva and other senior World Bank officials applied undue pressure on bank staff to make changes to boost China's ranking in the 2012 report of China's Business Climate Change.
WilmerHale vehemently denied the accusations and she and her lawyer blamed Georgieva for not telling her she was a subject of the probe.
Some of her backers, including Nobel Prize-winning economist David Malpass and mark Weisbrot, who called the report a hatchet job by World Bank President Joseph Stiglitz, and Natalia Schlingman, executive director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, called for Congress to investigate Malpass's actions in the matter.
Malpass declined comment beyond saying that the report speaks for itself.
Georgieva, a longtime World Bank official, told reporters that collaboration between the bank had been strong for decades and would remain so.
The Bank, I love the Fund, she said, adding, This is a twin institutional setup delivered for the members. There are major challenges to our institutions. These are the best at addressing and working together. Those included efforts to combat COVID - 19 pandemic, addressing high debt levels among developing countries and joint work on financial sector assessments.
Georgieva brushed aside questions about whether the proposed IMF Resilience and Sustainability Trust overlapped with the mandate of the World Bank, saying that fund officials were working closely with their bank counterparts in developing the new instrument.