World Bank Shuffles Staff to Address Cyber-Breaches

The World Bank’s statements minimizing the breaches and attacking accounts of them were plainly contradicted by internal Bank memos showing top information technology officers in a state of high alert and alarm. On Friday, November 15, another Behar story reported that, through a World Bank connection, the spyware had also penetrated the information security system at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Satyam, one of India’s major information technology companies, was contracted to work at the World Bank at the behest of Muhsin in 2003. A formal investigation of Muhsin concluded in 2007 that he had been improperly influenced by Satyam: “reasonably sufficient evidence” demonstrated that Muhsin had secured as much as $100 million in contracts and purchase orders for Satyam in exchange for stock options at preferential prices.

Despite Muhsin’s banishment from the Bank, Satyam was allowed to continue working until September 2008 without penalty or effective monitoring. For five years, through the terms of both ‘anti-corruption’ presidents of the Bank, James Wolfensohn and Paul Wolfowitz, the firm operated inside the Bank with impunity. This permissiveness of improper influence is at odds with international anticorruption conventions, which the Bank routinely exhorts its borrowing countries to respect. The United Nations Convention Against Corruption criminalizes:

[T]he promise, offering or giving to a foreign public official or an official of a public international organization, directly or indirectly, of an undue advantage, for the official himself or herself or another person or entity, in order that the official act or refrain from acting in the exercise of his or her official duties, in order to obtain or retain business or other undue advantage in relation to the conduct of international business (Article 16).

The World Bank’s Public Sector Governance Group, which seeks to educate borrowing countries about fraud and corruption, has declared: “Corruption sabotages policies and programs that aim to reduce poverty, so attacking corruption is critical to the achievement of the Bank's overarching mission of poverty reduction.” The high-minded rhetoric is squarely at odds with real practice at the institution, which has consistently renewed contracts to a vendor suspected of bribery.

Government Accountability Project

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