World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz did not tell the truth during Monday’s hearing into the scandal surrounding his girlfriend’s promotion, said former Dutch Labour leader Ad Melkert on the TV programme Nova on Tuesday night.

Melkert said Wolfowitz was not telling the truth when he claimed he had followed the advice of the bank’s ethics committee – which was chaired by Melkert at the time.
‘This would have meant we were agreeing to extremely special conditions for Ms [Shaha] Riza and that was absolutely not the case,’ ANP news agency reports Melkert as saying.
Riza was transferred to a new function because of her relationship with Wolfowitz. The promotion was justified, as was financial compensation, said Melkert.
‘The promotion was settled according to our advice. But we were not involved with the exact conditions under which that would take place,’ he said.
According to Melkert, the ethics committee agreed to a transfer for Riza and compensation for loss of income. If Wolfowitz had followed this advice there would have been no problem, but he went further and gave his partner a further promotion and a higher salary, said Melkert.