© Reuters
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International Monetary Fund officials, including managing director Kristalina Georgieva, have softened the tone of the assessment of the environmental risks to the Brazilian economy after the government of President Jair Bolsonaro opposed the language used. This happened sometime in late July and affected a key annual assessment known as the Article IV consultation with the largest Latin American economy.
This was stated by Bloomberg in a new accusation against Georgieva, confirmed by an employee of the fund, but this time not for her actions at the World Bank, but after she headed the IMF in October 2019.
The agency describes that on July 30, 2021, the fund’s management agreed to the employees’ report, but withdrew its approval a few hours later and then removed the controversial phrases.
Editing the text of a document is a common practice involving dialogue between staff, management and a representative of one of the 190 member states. It is also standard for senior management to review and sign the assessment, an IMF spokesman said.
However, it is rare to withdraw an already approved text for Article IV consultations. “The management made the decision after Georgieva met with the Brazilian representative on the board of the fund Alfonso Bevilacqua, who repeatedly complained that the IMF assessment did not cover the national climate policy,” Bloomberg writes. About 90 minutes after the report was approved, IMF officials learned that Bevilacco was keen to share his views on the issue.
The agency did not provide further details on what happened, but compared the final report of September 22nd to a “previous version” without indicating whether it was approved on July 30th. There is a difference between the two, because in the final version there is no recorded risk for the Brazilian commodity industry from frequent extremes over time, while in the previous one it was written “Climate change poses a macro-critical risk to the Brazilian economy”.
There are other missing texts from the public report, with Bloomberg talking about about 60 words missing. Brazil has – like all other countries – the right to prevent the publication, but has not taken advantage of it.
The agency’s publication coincides with a meeting of the IMF board to discuss the case with allegations against Kristalina Georgieva by a US law firm concerning her work at the World Bank.
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