Posted on 02/10/2009 5:28:52 AM PST by khnyny
Managers at the World Bank provided false information to the agency's board of directors about a $39 million, politically-connected European "coastal cleanup" project that led to the destruction and destitution of a powerless village in Albania in 2007 and then spent nearly two years trying to cover it up, FOX News has learned.
Bank insiders also misled and stonewalled a panel of independent investigators commissioned by the board to investigate the scandal, according to the investigators themselves.
World Bank sources tell FOX News that the panel's report, submitted to the 24-member board in late November, is one of the most damning independent assessments of the anti-poverty agency's behavior in the bank's 60-year history. The bank, the world's largest and most influential anti-poverty institution and part of the U.N. system, is doling out $100 billion over the next three years for development projects.
For its part, once the report leaked in Albania last week, the bank announced that further disbursements of the loan for the Albanian project had been temporarily suspended on Jan. 9 "due to certain outstanding policy and operational issues." A World Bank spokesman did not comment to FOX News by press time.
The scandal, laid out in documents also leaked to FOX News, paints a sharply-detailed picture of how the bank has responded to its own discovery of misconduct and potential corruption.
It also shows how projects ostensibly intended to improve the environment and living conditions in far-flung parts of the world can be abused and distorted in the name of the bank.
Moreover, as FOX reported in a series of articles since October, the bank has suppressed information on many other critical matters...
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
ping
FLASHBACK: from 9/15/08:
How did Obama know THEN
that we would experience the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression
when those who did not plan the takeover would not know for three more months?
October 10, 2008, another massive selloff.
Thanks. I have my reading assignment...
World bank, WTO, IMF, UN. All need to go the way of the dinosaur.
Destruction and corruption in Albania, the Republican’s favorite Balkan playground and source of campaign funds. Big surprise! Frankly its a real shame the entire hell hole isn’t treated to this level of destruction, roughly akin to what both the Clinton and Bush gangs subsidized for the Albanians in Serbia and Kosovo.
Hey now, they’re just trying to help the poor./s
I'm sure that this bit of bureaucratic weasel language will assure the hapless Albanian villagers who had their homes bulldozed so that the World Bank could build a private resort.
Meanwhile, World Bank president Zoellick is arguing that the bank should distribute even more money on behalf of the world's dispossessed.In a column in London's Financial Times on Jan. 25, he called for an "Age of Responsibility" that would include developed countries giving nearly 1 percent of their economic stimulus packages to the world's poor.
Of course they are. And a bonus for their trouble.
lets hope they don’t send in peacekeepers.... then it’d get real nasty
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.