IMF chief charged with attempted rape of maid in New York

NEW YORK: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and a potential candidate for the French presidency next year, was charged with attempted rape and a criminal sex act on a woman in a New York hotel, the police said on Sunday.
The charges stem from an incident that allegedly occurred on Saturday against a 32-year-old woman at a Sofitel hotel in midtown Manhattan, the New York Police Department said in an e- mailed statement early on Sunday. Strauss-Kahn was arrested on an Air France flight at John F Kennedy airport, the police said. He also was charged with unlawful imprisonment. Strauss-Kahn, 62, denies the charges and will plead not guilty, his lawyer Benjamin Brafman said in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg News on Sunday. The alleged victim is a maid at the hotel, Browne said, according to the New York Times. The assault occurred about 1 pm on Saturday when the woman entered the $3,000-a-night suite — Room 2806 — Strauss-Kahn had checked into on May 13.

The maid managed to escape from the room and notified colleagues who called the police, Browne told The Times. When officers arrived, Strauss-Kahn was not there and appeared to have left in a hurry, Browne said. His mobile phone had been left behind, Browne told the newspaper.

Immunity?

“Mr Strauss-Kahn has retained legal counsel, and the IMF has no comment on the case; all inquiries will be referred to his personal lawyer and to the local authorities,” Caroline Atkinson, director of external relations at the IMF, said in the statement.

New York police said Strauss-Kahn doesn’t have diplomatic immunity. The French Foreign Ministry in Paris said the IMF will have to examine what immunity Strauss-Kahn may have.

Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister and member of France’s opposition Socialist Party, has consistently been among the most popular possible candidates to contest France’s 2012 presidential election, opinion polls show.

President Nicolas Sarkozy would have trailed Strauss-Kahn by 5 percentage points in the first round of presidential voting if the election had been held at the end of last month, a CSA poll showed on April 28.

French Presidency

Strauss-Kahn, whose term at the IMF expires next year, over the last several months has declined to say whether he was planning to run for president. The vote will be held in April and May 2012.

This is the second time since he took the helm of the IMF in November 2007 that Strauss-Kahn has faced allegations of misconduct. In 2008, he had a relationship with Piroska Nagy, a female economist at the IMF, who quit in August of that year. An investigation by the IMF board, released in October 2008, concluded that while he had made a “serious error of judgment,” he shouldn’t be fired.

Strauss-Kahn apologised to his staff and family, which includes his third wife, French television journalist Anne Sinclair, and four children from his previous marriages.

Management Changes

“For fund critics and challengers of Western leadership in international financial institutions, this is emblematic of poor judgement and may further motivate them to call for serious changes in management,” Momani said.

Last month, officials from the Group of 24, which includes Brazil, China and Mexico, repeated a call for “an open, transparent, merit-based process” for choosing the heads of the World Bank and IMF, “without regard to nationality.” The IMF job is traditionally held by a European, while an American leads the World Bank.

Strauss-Kahn took the helm of the IMF in November 2007, following his loss in the primaries of the French Socialist Party ahead of the 2007 presidential elections.

Strauss-Kahn, who succeeded Spain’s Rodrigo Rato, has helped reshape the agency’s mission and restore its relevance. When he arrived, its emergency lending dropped to $58.7 million in 2006 from $66.4 billion in 2002. Among his first moves there, was to cut about 400 jobs.

Financial Crisis

The global financial panic triggered by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings in September 2008 restored the Washington-based IMF’s relevance as its emergency loans soared to a record of $91.7 billion last year from $1.1 billion in 2007.

Strauss-Kahn gained backing from the Group of 20 to triple the IMF’s resources, and the group has over the past two years given the agency a host of new missions to help avoid another crisis. The IMF is helping the G-20 single out countries whose policies threaten global growth, and has also submitted proposals to fortify the international monetary system.

More recently, he played a key role in efforts to stem the European debt crisis which started last year in Greece, with a pledge to contribute about a third of future bailouts in the region by the European Union. The IMF has co-funded aid packages to Greece and Ireland. He was due to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday.

Emerging Nations

Under Strauss-Kahn, the IMF also approved a plan that will make China the third-strongest voice in the 187-member organisation, founded in 1945, while weakening Europe’s influence to make room for emerging countries.

Strauss Kahn has juggled careers as an economics professor, lawyer and Socialist politician. He holds a law degree and a doctorate in economics from the University of Paris.

In 1986, he was elected to the National Assembly and served as industry minister from 1991 to 1993. He returned to office as finance minister under Premier Lionel Jospin in 1997. He cut France’s budget deficit to below 3% in 1999, the level required for euro membership.

In November 1999, he resigned as finance minister after magistrates began an investigation into financial irregularities at MNEF, a French student insurance group. The probe covered an allegation that the company had paid him about $100,000 from 1994 to 1996 for legal work on a property deal that he never performed. Strauss-Kahn denied wrongdoing and was cleared by a Paris court in November 2001.