MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Zoellick on WB fund raising tour warns about corruption

WB President Robert Zoellick

World Bank President Robert Zoellick criticized on Thursday corruption in poor countries that receive the bank's loans, echoing the anti-graft stance of his controversial predecessor, Paul Wolfowitz.

"If people are trying to steal the World Bank's money, we can't accept that," Zoellick told reporters. "We are responsible to our contributors and the contributors have their taxpayers. Nobody wants their money stolen," he said at a news conference in Japan, the bank's second-largest shareholder. Zoellick, visiting Asia for the first time as World Bank chief, said while countries have different views on how to tackle corruption, they do agree on the need to deal with the problem. He added that some developing countries would need the bank's support in building social infrastructure, such as a solid judiciary system, to fight corruption. Wolfowitz, who resigned earlier this year over a scandal involving the promotion of his girlfriend, alarmed some African nations and even those within the bank with his strict anti-corruption drive, which critics feared would slow the flow of aid to the poor. Zoellick himself has said little about whether he will stick with that strategy or change the way the bank approaches corruption in borrowing countries. His five-year tenure begins in the middle of the bank's critical year-long fund-raising for its lending programs to its poorest borrowers, which will set the course of the bank for the next three years starting mid-2008. The former U.S. chief trade negotiator and deputy secretary of state, stopped in Australia, Cambodia and Vietnam before arriving in Japan, a major donor of international development aid.