Exclusive: Sex nepotism scandal puts Spanish IFAD president's second term in doubt

 The affair has climaxed a constellation of complaints by IFAD staff and whistleblowers against harassment by IFAD senior management including one woman Italian senior manager slapping a subordinate employee in the face and constant verbal abuse of underlings by the IFAD Managing Director of the newly-created Office of Development Effectiveness, Carola Alvarez, an Argentine American former senior manager of the Inter-American Development Bank.  

 The IFAD Head of Ethics, Patrizia Perez, has opened inquiries to look into alleged nepotism by Ms Alvarez who has hired friends, all Latin Americans or Spanish, as consultants being paid double or triple the normal daily rate and has directly appointed staff members without a due process of competition.  She is notorious for her verbal and psychological abuse of employees at the UN agency. Alvarez is also known for making Spanish a requirement to be hired in her front office and included into her inner circle of traffic of favours and influence.

 IFAD is a Rome-based development bank for small farmers that has been rocked by a series of graft and nepotism scandals in the past including rigging of personal expense audits by Kanayo Nwanze, the late Nigerian former IFAD president, who lived a life of luxury in a sprawling villa on the Appian Way until the Italian Insider in 2009 disclosed his ritzy lifestyle at the expense of donors to the poor.  

 Sources close to Lario’s office have shared evidence of collusion between Alvarez and Costanza Di Nucci, a long-time IFAD staffer who also is Argentinian, to create the position for Ms Di Nucci as Chief Strategy Officer which was never out for competition, and prepared the paperwork for Lario to sign off on the appointment after arranging approval by Human Resources with the support of other members of IFAD’s Executive Management Team. Alvarez boasts about her alleged control over Mr Lario and her close relationship with ms Di Nucci claiming that she was the one to first learn about the alleged affair and Lario’s subsequent divorce, the sources added.

 Even though Ms Di Nucci is no longer acting as Lario’s Special Advisor, he and Alvarez exercised their authority to include her in IFAD’s delegation to the recent World Bank Spring meetings in Washington, D.C. excluding a more senior officer who was scheduled to go on the trip with him,the sources said, speaking on condition they not be named.

 Lario’s distinct protection of Alvarez has gone as far as instructing the Ethics Office to prevent complaints from turning into investigations and exercising his power to pressure IFAD senior management to intimidate whistleblowers by threatening them that they will be classified as medically “not fit for work,” meaning that they are blacklisted from working anywhere in the UN system, the sources added.

 At least three senior diplomats, one of them representing one of IFAD’s major donors, have complained in person to Lario about his protection of Alvarez, who apparently has been grooming Di Nucci to take her place when she retires from IFAD at the end of the year, telling him flatly “you shouldn’t be allowing this in an election year” but were faced with empty promises and dismissal.

 Lario is evidently hoping to be elected unopposed but Italy has protested to Spain over Madrid’s decision to field a candidate to be director general of sister agency FAO as well as supporting Lario’s bid for re-election at IFAD. Italian agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida accused Madrid of wanting “food hegemony.”

 The IFAD staff association has called for the agency to implement and enforce protective measures for whistleblowers who denounce misconduct and harassment including lateral movement to other jobs or providing special leave if no other jobs are available. In the absence of such protection those suffering harassment by members of the senior management team are forced to take sick leave after which they can be forced to face fitness for work tests that can destroy their careers.

 A number of staffers who made informal complaints to the Ethics Office about Alvarez never formalized them in the face of intimidation, the sources added.

 Lario’s protection of Alvarez has climaxed staff demoralisation at the agency. “When Lario became president everyone was believing and trusting him as a value based leader compared to his very political predecessor Gilbert Houngbo, who left to lead the ILO,” one veteran IFAD staffer said.

 “Even interns asking in townhalls about changes to contracting terms have faced retaliation. Long-serving members of IFAD’s senior management have voiced their concerns about the climate of fear and “omerta” at IFAD, and in the IFAD corridors now people are expressing nostalgia for Houngbo.”

 IFAD did not respond to a request from the Insider to comment on the complaints against Alvarez.