World Bank stand against graft reiterated

The President of the World Bank (WB) Group, Jim Yong Kim, has strongly reiterated the Bank's commitment to pursue anti-corruption efforts.

In an address to a gathering at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington last Wednesday, he noted the WB has played an important role in the evolution of the global integrity and good governance agenda ever since Jim Wolfensohn's "Cancer of Corruption" speech at the Bank's annual meeting in 1996.

"For me, Jim's original words resonate every bit as strongly today as when they were first uttered 16 years ago", Mr. Kim said.

He said "when corruption is discovered in our projects and activities, we have zero tolerance for it within the World Bank Group."

Mentioning the developments over the Padma Bridge project in his speech on anti-corruption at the CSIS, the WB president said, "sometimes things go wrong and then we need to stand firm."

"This is what happened in the case of the Padma Bridge Project where insufficient response by the authorities to the evidence of corruption at the time made us terminate a $1.2 billion credit in June last year," he noted.

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