Cuban-American Mauricio Claver-Carone, a former member of the National Security Council during the Donald Trump administration after years of anti-Castro lobbying in Washington, is now the target of an investigation by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which is president, for maintaining alleged personal relations with a subordinate and for having improperly spent the funds of the institution.
The accusations arose with the arrival at the IDB of an email with the complaints, which began to be analyzed by the board of directors on Tuesday of last week and at a meeting on Thursday, revealed the British agency Reuters, which obtained confirmation of lesse meetings by three anonymous sources.
The IDB did not want to confirm the news, nor did Claver-Carone reply to emails. OnCuba he thinks he knows who is the person with whom the president of the bank allegedly maintains a personal relationship that perhaps began when they both worked at the National Security Council. But, for the moment, she refrains from disclosing it for lack of convincing evidence.
One of the sources, an IDB person with direct knowledge of the matter, said directors have discussed hiring an outside firm to investigate the allegations and asking Claver-Carone to step down from the presidency for a time.
The other two sources confirmed that the bank’s 14 directors, its general counsel and deputy secretary met to discuss the allegations and how to proceed in a two-and-a-half-hour virtual meeting on Tuesday last week.
The directors met again on Thursday to draft a resolution and hire an outside firm to investigate the allegations, the bank source said. And they decided not to propose removing Claver-Carone from his job, the IDB person with direct knowledge said.
Personal relationships between IDB directors are prohibited by the bank’s rules. The entity’s code of ethics states: “You may not participate in any decision related to the employment of someone with whom you have an intimate relationship.”
The anonymous email sent to the bank’s board of directors and ethics officer accuses Claver-Carone of having a relationship with a strategist who reports to him. The email also accuses Claver-Carone and the staff member in question of embezzling IDB funds, a source said, without elaborating, according to Reuters.
Before coming to the IDB in 2020, Claver-Carone served under Trump as Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council.
The IDB is a much smaller development bank than the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, but it is a key player in Latin America. It was responsible for $23.4 billion in financing and other financial commitments to Latin America and the Caribbean in 2021, according to bank figures.
Claver-Carone, a hardline hawk against Cuba, faced strong backlash ahead of his election to the IDB presidency in 2020 from some member states, including Argentina and Mexico, who bristled at breaking the bank’s tradition since 1959. of having a president of a Latin American country.
