WASHINGTON, 14 April 2007 — The World Bank’s board of directors adjourned a meeting yesterday over the promotion by bank President Paul Wolfowitz of his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, saying it would move quickly to decide how to proceed.

In a statement, the board said it found that Wolfowitz signed off on Riza’s promotion and salary increase without a review by an ethics committee nor the board’s chairman. The promotion came shortly after he joined the institution in 2005.

“The executive directors will move expeditiously to reach a conclusion on possible actions to take,” the board said.

“In their consideration of the matter the executive directors will focus on all relevant governance implications for the bank,” it added.

The board released documents of findings of an ad hoc group that investigated the contract agreed with Riza and also included communications between Wolfowitz, the board and other bank officials. The review yesterday by the board of member countries focused on whether Wolfowitz broke staff rules when he approved Riza’s promotion, before she was assigned to the State Department to resolve possible conflict of interest issues arising from his supervision over her work.

Wolfowitz has taken full responsibility for Riza’s promotion and apologized Thursday, saying he made a mistake in the way he handled the issue, but said he was in “uncharted waters” and still new in his job.

“In hindsight, I wish I had trusted my original instincts and kept myself out of the negotiations. I made a mistake, for which I am sorry,” he said in an opening statement at a news conference.

The board said Wolfowitz had revealed his relationship with Riza while he was negotiating his own job contract and, at the directors’ request, sought guidance from the board’s ethics committee.

“The guidance given on an informal basis was that the employee should be relocated to a position beyond potential supervising influence,” the board said.

Wolfowitz, who was nominated for the bank job in 2005 by President George W. Bush, joined the institution from the Pentagon, where he was one of the architects of Iraq War.

He has faced lingering distrust by many staff members and resentment over his close ties to the Bush administration and his role in the Iraq War that have overshadowed his first two years at the bank. The bank’s staff representative association, which demanded last week that Wolfowitz explain his actions, have called on Wolfowitz to resign, saying it seemed impossible for the institution, whose mission is to fight global poverty, to move forward “with any sense of purpose under the present leadership.”

The White House said yesterday President Bush continued to support Wolfowitz and hoped he stayed in his post. “The president fully supports Wolfowitz and wants him to continue his service as World Bank president,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Earlier White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said: “The president has confidence in Paul Wolfowitz and his work. At the organization, he has worked to lift people out of poverty around the world, he has focused his priorities on Africa, good governance and how the World Bank can respond better and more efficiently to crises around the world.”

Early yesterday, the World Bank released more than 100 pages of documents that exposed the pivotal role played by Wolfowitz in awarding startling pay hikes to his girlfriend.

They included an August 2005 memorandum from Wolfowitz that ordered the bank’s human resources division to award his Libyan-born partner, Riza, pay increases that took her bank salary to nearly $200,000.

Wolfowitz directed that Riza, who was being moved from the World Bank’s Middle East communications office to the US State Department, should move to an even higher pay grade if “I stay on to serve a second term.” He concluded the memo by expressing his “deep unhappiness” that the bank’s ethics committee had rejected his preferred resolution to the situation. World Bank staff rules forbid an employee from working under another’s supervision if the two are in a relationship.

A letter dated April 9 from Riza to the Dutch World Bank representative leading the investigation, Herman Wijffels, was also published. In it, she complained that she had been the subject of “the most vicious public attacks” and was being “victimized” for abiding by a reassignment that she herself had opposed.