The World Bank executive board has concluded that the bank's president, Paul D. Wolfowitz, broke ethics rules in engineering a hefty pay raise for his girlfriend, and plans to try to end his tenure next week, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

Board members do not want to vote to fire Wolfowitz since that might provoke a rupture with the bank's largest shareholder, the United States, senior bank officials were quoted as saying.

Instead, they are inclined to adopt a resolution saying they have lost confidence in him, hoping that will persuade him to resign.

Wolfowitz has said that he granted his companion, Shaha Riza, a pay raise and promotion on advice from an ethics board at the bank. His attorney, Robert S. Bennett, declined Friday to say what Wolfowitz would do if the board voted to express no confidence in him, according to the Post.

Wolfowitz Friday was completing a written response to the accusations against him. He has been invited to appear before the board Tuesday, and the no-confidence vote could come soon after, the bank officials said.

Though prominent officials from Europe to Latin America have publicly called on Wolfowitz to go, and though the board has the power to fire him, a decisive vote would break sharply with the bank's consensus-minded culture, while presenting nettlesome questions of procedure and diplomacy, the Post said.

Never in the six decades of the World Bank's existence has the board removed the institution's leader, who, by tradition, is selected by the U.S. president.

Source: Xinhua