The Board of Directors of the World Bank (WB) has rejected the request of the current director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Kristalina Georgieva for a meeting in her defense against allegations that as executive director of the WB in 2017 she pressured employees to change data in the Doing Business report in 2018, Reuters reported, citing sources.
According to the agency, a petition for the meeting was submitted by one of Georgieva’s lawyers to the director of the World Bank board. It emphasizes that the audit report on violations in the publication of the report on bank rating Doing Business for 2018, prepared by the law firm WilmerHale, was incorrectly prepared and violates the procedural rights of Georgieva.
The authors of the report of WilmerHale, published in September, believe that WB employees have committed various violations in compiling the rating in Doing Business for 2018. The indicators of China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were inflated, while those of Azerbaijan were artificially lowered. Doing Business’s annual reports assess the business environment in different countries. According to the report of WilmerHale’s auditors, in the case of China, the data were changed under the pressure of Jim Yong Kim, who was president of the World Bank at the time, and also mostly under the influence of Georgieva.
Georgieva denied the allegations against her. She took over the leadership of the IMF in the fall of 2019. In September, the World Bank announced its decision to abandon the practice of preparing Doing Business reports in light of the information about violations in their preparation.
– .
