Paul Wolfowitz's fall from grace in the World Bank for helping engineer a massive pay increase for his female companion, Shaha Riza, while she was still a bank staff member was long overdue. In fact he should never have been appointed in the first place.

When news of his possible appointment as the bank's new president to replace James D Wolfensohn first emerged in late 2004, some colleagues and I at the bank lobbied very hard to prevent it happening.

This was not just a political appointment foisted by the US on the most important development assistance agency in the world. It was also a particularly bad appointment in view of his well-documented past as a foreign policy 'hawk' in the Pentagon and US State Department; his advocacy of preemption and unilateralism both of which are central tenets of Bush's ruinous doctrine - and his two-faced weak espousal of democratic values and human rights in the countries he advised on or served.

The clock cannot be turned back on the suffering and bloodshed by the millions of innocent Iraqis that are directly or indirectly due to his foreign policy work. However, a small measure of poetic justice has now been achieved by his disgrace.

Whichever way the final decision of the bank's executive board on his tenure as bank president is spun, it is clear that he was caught red-handed abusing his authority and undermining the ethical values that he claimed to be espousing at the bank and in his other positions.

Unfortunately, what has now been dubbed as 'Rizagate' has also resulted in collateral damage to the bank whose image and moral authority on good governance, accountability and in the fight against corruption are now undermined.