Legal News

IMF Lawyers Up for Probe Into Chief?s Affair

By Dan Slater

It was just last year that World Bank boss Paul Wolfowitz, under investigation by the bank’s board for giving his companion a pay raise, hired Skadden’s ubiquitous Bob Bennett. Now another economics heavy, International Monetary Fund Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is at the center of an investigation into whether he abused his position in connection with a sexual relationship with a subordinate, the Hungarian-born Piroska Nagy, who used to be a senior official in the IMF’s Africa department.

Who does the IMF turn to to handle this hot potato? Robert Smith (Mount Saint Mary’s College, Georgetown law), a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. Judging from his firm bio, Smith (pictured, above left) has some serious employment law credibility, though we’re not entirely clear on how he got the IMF gig. A call to Smith’s office was not immediately returned.

However, through a spokeswoman for Morgan Lewis, Smith told the Law Blog that Strauss Kahn is using William Taylor (pictured, left) at Zuckerman Spaeder. Taylor (UNC, Yale law) is a Beltway Big repped several public officials in the Whitewater and DNC fundraising investigations.

As for Nagy, the WSJ reported on Saturday that she’s being repped by Arnold & Porter’s Robert Litt (picture, right; Harvard, Yale law), who told the Journal that Nagy “doesn’t comment on her personal life.”

UPDATE: The Journal is reporting that Strauss-Kahn apologized to the IMF staff this morning for what he called “an incident concerning me and a staff member.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 20, 2008 (boomark / email).