World Bank funding China's bad behavior, fmr. president Wolfowitz says
Former World Bank President Amb. Paul Wolfowitz on Trump administration trade negotiations with China and his concerns over the World Bank's role in Chinese investment projects in developing countries.
Amb. Paul Wolfowitz told FOX Business on Monday that the World Bank may be contributing to China’s bad behavior.
“The one thing I would say where it’s not negligible, in which I find disturbing, has been a tendency to promote these Chinese investment projects in developing countries with funds borrowed frankly from the American taxpayer recycled into countries of great strategic and economic importance and putting them in debts that they cannot repay,” he told David Asman on “Cavuto: Coast-to-Coast.” “I don’t think that’s a good pattern for the World Bank.”
Wolfowitz, who led the financial institution from 2005 to 2007, said while he was president, China was “behaving better” but with Xi Jinping in charge, he has seen distinct changes both internally and externally.
“Part of that change has been this very ambitious Belt and Road project they call it which builds up stakes in a whole range of countries,” he said. “And the ones that concern me at the moment are these African countries with very corrupt mining sectors where the Chinese can operate very easily because they have no Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”
The law, enacted in 1977, forbids the payment of bribes to foreign officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business.
Wolfowitz added that American companies are at a disadvantage.
“It’s an unlevel playing field,” he said.
The U.S. and China, are the world's largest economies, and have been embroiled in a tit-for-tat trade war for months.