The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is not used to grabbing headlines, but two years of noisy internal power struggles have captured international attention. Now, a scandal at the top of the organization that led to the firing of President Mauricio Claver-Carone may have been the final storm before a return to normalcy.
Mr. Claver-Carone’s nomination, pushed for by former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2020, broke a 60-year IDB tradition of having a Latin American preside over the institution.
Many in the region saw the breaking of this unwritten rule as altering a well-established power balance that compensated for traditional U.S. leadership at the World Bank and European leadership of the International Monetary Fund.
The former IDB head was also at odds with the crucial Appropriations Committees in the U.S. Congress, a fact that blocked potential capital increases to the institution, which is dedicated to financing development projects across Latin America and the Caribbean.
But on September 26, the IDB voted to fire him after a unanimous recommendation from the board of directors, following an investigation into sexual misconduct.
A law firm hired by the IDB board found that Mr. Claver-Carone was in a romantic relationship with his chief of staff since 2019, and favored her with a 40-percent pay rise that prompted conflict-of-interest questions, even though her salary was in line with that of...
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