Lagarde's impending trial in France clouds outlook for IMF head

Tokyo

NEWS that International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Christine Lagarde is to stand trial in France for alleged financial negligence during her period as French finance minister evokes comparisons with the fate of her immediate predecessor Dominique Strauss Kahn, who fell victim to allegations of sexual assault in New York and subsequently resigned.

It has echoes too of what happened to Mr Strauss Kahn's predecessor Rodrigo Rato, a former Spanish government economics minister who was briefly placed under arrest last year after reportedly amassing a personal fortune of at least 27 million euros (S$40 million), and was investigated for tax evasion.

This extraordinary sequence of alleged scandals implicating three successive heads of the world's most powerful multilateral financial institution raises questions, some say, about the relationship between key European member governments of the IMF, an…