Recent White House backing for the beleaguered World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, despite the findings of an internal report that said he had violated the Bank’s ethics rules, is bringing the role of the US in running the Bank in “undemocratic” ways under scrutiny, with rising calls for Washington to loosen its grip on the institution. On Tuesday, the anonymous World Bank whistleblower who initially helped leak documents about the hefty pay and promotion package Wolfowitz engineered for his girlfriend and fellow Bank official, Shaha Riza, spoke out in a letter published on the Internet and called for more democratic process to select the World Bank president.

“Today, we do not know the final outcome of the Paul Wolfowitz scandal at the Bank. We do know that we are well past the point when the Bank president could resign with any semblance of good grace,” the letter says. “At the World Bank many of us believe that this unseemly episode clearly illustrates the need for rapid reform of the governance framework, in general, and the presidential selection process in particular,” said the letter, posted on the website of the Government Accountability Project (GAP), a Washington-based whistleblower protection agency.

The letter describes a sense of disappointment among Bank’s 10,000-strong staff that the US government, despite its rhetoric about democracy around the world, appears unabashed in its continued backing for Wolfowitz despite the findings of the Bank panel and the sentiment of Bank staff who have made it clear they want to see Wolfowitz’s departure. “As Bank staff, we watched incredulously with the rest of the world as this man demonstrated that he was accountable solely to the leader of a single country, a country which owns only 16% of the Bank’s shares and whose policies show that it remains unaffected by views of its global neighbours,” said the letter referring to the US unilateral style.

White House Spokesman Tony Snow reiterated support for Wolfowitz on Tuesday while US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during a visit to Moscow that the panel’s results do not “seem to be the kind of thing that you would want to see the dismissal of the World Bank president over.” US Vice President Dick Cheney had earlier backed Wolfowitz and advised him to stay on. But this support has so far only brought more attention to Washington’s unchecked influence inside one of the world’s most influential economic institutions. When the Washington-based World Bank was first set up in 1944 by the victors of World War II, they had reached an informal agreement allowing the US to appoint the head of the World Bank.

Bank campaigners lobbying for changes in a global economy they say is skewed in favour of rich nations also joined the fray, and are demanding more than merely another US replacement for Wolfowitz. “The head of the World Bank Group, ostensibly the most important position in development financing, should not be the unilateral decision of the US,” said Sameer Dossani of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, an organisation that has fought the Bank’s influence on poor nations. “If the World Bank has any hope of recovering from this ordeal, it must at least make some attempt at developing transparent and democratic procedures for hiring its own president,” he said. — IPS