Statement by Senior World Bank President Francois Bourguignon on

							STATEMENT BY SENIOR WORLD BANK PRESIDENT FRANCOIS
   BOURGUIGNON ON RESIGNATION OF PRESIDENT PAUL
                   WOLFOWITZ


Bled, Slovenia, May 18, 2007. At a press opportunity this morning, World Bank Chief
Economist and Senior Vice President Francois Bourguignon said the following:

"I said yesterday we were hoping for a quick resolution of the crisis; now the crisis has
been resolved with the joint decision by the Board and Mr. wolfowitz.

This part of the crisis is over and now we are entering a new stage which will entail the
process of appointing the new President.

As you know there are some different views regarding whether or not it will still be the
U.S. that will have this responsibility [to nominate candidates]. The exact process that
will be followed is not clear yet. My position is that we want a process by which the
shareholders will be able to select the best person to lead the Bank.

We need a president and this is urgent. Equally urgent is to make sure that the
weaknesses of the governing structure of the bank, which became apparent with this
crisis, will be remedied, and that shareholders will take advantage of this crisis, its
intensity and its seriousness, to change and to adapt the governance structure to make
sure this will not happen again.

I hope that the next President will be appointed very shortly, simply because there is a
need to move forward, but experience suggests that it may take some weeks.

Until now, I don't think that the image [of the Bank] was really damaged, although the
credibility has been reduced. What happened is that our partners in the world simply
thought it was difficult to deal with the Bank regarding major decisions. However, they
knew that the time would come when it would be possible to interact with the Bank as
before with maximum effectiveness.

We are almost back to normal-- we'll be back to normal the day when we have a new
president. This new president will incarnate what the World Bank Group is about and
will represent the mission of the Bank."