The article pointed out that Wolfowitz girlfriend was working at the World Bank, and has been getting paid quite well since her lover as taken over the ranks.
Wolfowitz asked that she be allowed to maintain her job at MENA and to work with him as necessary, offering to recuse himself from any decisions concerning her pay and work conditions. “It really gave a bad impression, especially for somebody who was making a big issue of good governance,” a former senior official at the bank said. “The president is supposed to set an example to everybody, and yet here he wanted to have his girlfriend working with him, which is flatly prohibited under bank rules.”
A Washington Post column from last week has added fuel to the fire.
There's some disgruntlement amongst the grossly overpaid World Bank crowd as the time approaches for calculating annual salary increases for 2007. Seems they're finding out that Shaha Riza, who's been romantically linked to bank President Paul Wolfowitz, has done exceptionally well in terms of salary in the last 18 months -- and she doesn't even work there.
[...]
Under bank rules -- remember, she is still on its payroll even at State -- the highest raise she should have gotten in her new job would be about $20,000, according to GAP's calculation. Instead, she got a $47,340 raise, which put her salary at $180,000.This fiscal year, while still at State, Riza got a raise of $13,500, bringing her up to $193,590, which is $7,000 more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes. Since she is at State and not the bank, the bank's staff rules should have allowed only about half that, GAP said. Even if she'd been at the bank and gotten the highest performance rating compared with other bank employees, she could not have gotten that big a raise, GAP said.
As Carolyn O'hara notes at Passport:
She now makes nearly $200,000 a year, more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ... Given Wolfowitz's crusade to fight corruption in countries that receive Bank aid, doesn't it seem a little hypocritical to hand your girlfriend inordinate bonuses?
