It was possibly the shortest of the hundreds of angry messages posted on the World Bank's staff website. But in the week bank president Paul Wolfowitz was accused of fixing up his girlfriend with a cosy new, highly paid job, it captured both the humour of the situation and the scale of his employees' sense of outrage.
'Maybe Wolfowitz wouldn't have so many holes in his socks if he stopped shooting himself in the foot,' the anonymous staffer wrote, referring to a well-publicised incident in January when their controversial boss removed his shoes and was photographed entering a Turkish mosque with his toes poking through.
It is doubtful Dr Wolfowitz saw the joke. A magnet for criticism since his appointment by US President George W. Bush two years ago, the leading neoconservative and architect of the Iraq war could not have picked a worse time to be back on the global stage; the World Bank's spring meeting takes place in Washington this weekend.
Instead of focusing solely on the issues of cancelling developing countries' debt and affording them financial support, Dr Wolfowitz will also face some awkward questions about his private life. How was it that Shaha Ali Riza, his Libyan-born, British divorcee girlfriend enjoyed a meteoric rise from communications officer in one of the bank's offices in the Middle East to a lucrative secondment to the US State Department where she earned more even than Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state?
'It's ironic that Mr Wolfowitz lectures developing countries about good governance and fighting corruption while winking at an irregular promotion and overly generous pay increases to a partner,' said Bea Edwards, international director of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project.
Like other members of the Bush inner circle, Dr Wolfowitz enjoys unstinting loyalty from the US president and is unlikely to be forced out by the growing controversy, analysts say, despite calls for his resignation. His original appointment to the bank's top job was seen as a reward for his own long-time loyalty to the administration as well as an opportunity for the White House to exercise influence over policy in the developing world.
