The Financial Express
May 24, 2006

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz has targeted bribe-givers in the rich world as he underlined his determination to root out the “cancer” of corruption in poor countries.

Attacked by campaigners for focusing too much on how to improve governance among the recipients of World Bank aid, Wolfowitz yesterday said he agreed that the problem had more than one dimension.

“For every bribe-taker, there’s a bribe-giver, and often that comes from a developed country,” he told a news conference after the World Bank’s spring meeting.

“We need to do more to address this issue and to hold private corporations accountable for exporting corruption to emerging economies,” Wolfowitz said, noting the bank’s website already has a lengthy list of blacklisted firms.

Since succeeding James Wolfensohn as World Bank President in June last year, Wolfowitz has made the fight against corruption a centerpiece of the 184-member organisation’s lending policies.

He said the members had given him a mandate to forge a new framework of anti-graft policies that would be common to both donor countries and aid recipients, in time for annual bank talks in Singapore in September.

Wolfowitz echoed Wolfensohn’s oft-stated description of corruption as “a cancer on the development process,” but warned that solutions would not come overnight.