Wilmer Hale report

There is a lot of talk in the FT and elsewhere about the position of one Kristalina Georgieva, a Bulgarian economist, as head of the IMF following a report by a law company called Wilmer Hale into alleged wrong doing while head of the World Bank. In particular, that she instructed staff to tweak data to do with rankings of some sort, in order to push China and a number of other countries up the rankings. It seems that US and Japan are out to get her, while others, particularly us here in Europe, are more supportive.

If it was me, and she is close to my age, having done postgraduate time at LSE at about the time that I was an undergraduate there, I think I would just pack it all up and retire to my cottage in the country. Sod them. She, however, is clearly made of different metal and looks to be fighting it out. Perhaps in the (television adaptation) words of the minister in a Maigret story (reference 4), she wants to be able to retire with honour, untainted by scandal. Against that, there is the observation made by the UK politician some years ago now, that political careers always end in failure. In the end, politicians never go quietly, some disaster or other always pushes them out, kicking and screaming. Against that, one can point to the advantages of fixed term appointments, or limited appointments, like those of the POTUS.

But I digress. The present point if interest is the invisibility of the report itself. There is plenty of chatter about the report in the media, but neither Google nor Bing are offering me sight of the report itself. Not even an executive summary or a press release from the World Bank.

Wilmer Hale are no better, and searching for her at reference 1 gets exactly nothing. Which is perhaps fair enough: they have no business releasing reports made to their clients to the public, whatever the public interest. That is a matter for those clients.

Finally, I go to the World Bank, where perhaps I should have started, and search there for Wilmer Hale turns up what I take to be the report as the second of fourteen results. Sixteen pages of it, with the top half of the first page of text snapped above. Hopefully, later today, I will be able to make my own mind up about whether this is a hatchet job by the US, some obscure part of their (and our) stand-off with China.

But not too hopeful. I doubt whether I will give the matter enough time to be able to part the clouds of obscurity from a standing start.

PS: maybe I will give more time to speculating what the bill for this investigation was. They collected 5,000,000 documents and looked properly at 80,000 of them. And all I have to go on is the bill presented recently by an Epsom law firm for looking at just one document of form of around twenty pages. Where by document of form, I mean a document organised on well known lines for a well known purpose; we are not talking very original text. No wonder Wilmer Hale have a very smooth looking web site.

References

Reference 1: https://www.wilmerhale.com/.

Reference 2: https://www.worldbank.org/en/home.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristalina_Georgieva.

Reference 4: Maigret chez le ministre - Georges Simenon - 1954. I knew my master list would come in useful one day.