Asia Times: The IMF just wants to be your friend



	January 08, 1999	atimes.com

Media/Technology

The IMF just wants to be your friend
By Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON - The International Monetary Fund (IMF),its name pilloried and invoked even by thieves, wants greaterpublic sympathy this year.

To help it win friends and influence people, the globalfinancial institution is hiring public relations industryleaders whose clients include oil companies plagued withenvironmental and human-rights problems.

''We want to strengthen public understanding of the IMF'smission, and to this end we are seeking the advice of outsidespecialists to learn how we might do more to explain ourselvesbetter,'' says Shailendra Anjaria, director of external relations.

Fund staffers often complain that their work has metunprecedented visibility - and vilification - since July 1997,when the collapse of Thailand's currency set off a financialcrisis that now threatens global recession. In a growing number ofstricken countries where the IMF now ministers austerityprogrammes, the agency's name is associated with deprivation - andsometimes depravity.

Last June, for example, three robbers entered a restaurant inBangkok, the Thai capital, and announced: ''This is the IMF era.Give us your money and we'll pay it back later.'' Patrons burstout laughing, according to reports at the time, forcing one of thethieves to fire gunshots at the ceiling to show them this was nojoke.

The IMF is dead serious about its image problem, hiring EdelmanPublic Relations Worldwide and market researchers WirthlinWorldwide to spend the next six months gauging public opinionabout the Fund and conducting in-depth interviews with 400 keyindividuals in 18 countries, before recommending ways to put theagency in a more favourable public light.

The Fund has 87 staffers assigned to 'Information and Liaison'functions and has a 1999 external relations budget of $24 million, according to the agency's latest annual report.

Fund officials have pressed borrowing countries to be more openabout their finances but they decline to say how much the Edelman-Wirthlin project will cost - as do the companies. Fund sources saythey are respecting the norms of business confidentiality. Companysources have told reporters the IMF told them to keep quiet.

''They're probably spending between $100,000 and $1 million,'' says John Stauber, editor of the quarterly 'PR Watch'. Kevin McCauley, an industry analyst at the O'Dwyer'spublishing company, puts the likely price tag at $200,000-$500,000.

Those estimates do not cover advertising or the creation of'third parties to lobby on behalf of a client or cause. Suchgimmicks are widely favoured by the public relations industry,according to Stauber.

Examples include include 'Citizens for a Free Kuwait', acoalition created to help build support for U.S. leadership in the1991 Gulf War. Wirthlin provided key market research with whichconsultants from another company assembled the coalition andcounseled the Kuwaiti ambassador here on how to appear sympatheticand trustworthy when appearing on U.S. television, according toStauber.

Wirthlin's more prominent clients include the RepublicanNational Committee, the organisational heart of the U.S.Republican Party. Republican back-benchers have been among theIMF's most vocal opponents here and Wirthlin ''might also help theIMF with some access, influence and insights in dealing withattacks from the right wing,'' says Stauber.

Edelman was founded in 1952 and has 60 affiliates around theworld. The company describes itself as a global leader in'reputation management'. It defines this as ''the orchestration ofdiscrete communications initiatives, designed to promote andprotect one of a company's most important assets - its corporatereputation - and to help shape an effective corporate image."

Edelman's top executives include Michael Deaver, former mediaadvisor to President Ronald Reagan. The company has counseledExxon Corp. over oil spills and Unocal Corp. over its presence inBurma, McCauley says. Other clients include British AmericanTobacco and government agencies from Chile, Colombia, India, andPortugal.

IMF officials hope the companies will help to deal withcriticism of their handling of crisis in Asia (where decades ofsocial progress have been reversed amid economic contraction),Russia (where the government defaulted on some foreign debts mereweeks after the IMF marshalled 22 billion dollars in internationalloans), and Brazil (where a deal struck with the centralgovernment is mired in disputes at state level).

The Fund also has been criticised for being, in Harvardeconomist Jeffrey Sachs's famous quip, ''more secretive than theCIA'', or Central Intelligence Agency. Edelman could prove usefulin this regard. In 1995, with the U.S. spy agency embroiled inscandals involving Soviet moles, sex-discrimination lawsuits andhuman rights abuses, 'Time' magazine published the followingadvice from Edelman Vice Chairman Leslie Dach: ''Give peopleinformation before it is beaten out of you."

Brickbats come not only from grassroots groups and otherfamiliar foes but also from prominent economists, including WorldBank Senior Vice President Joseph Stiglitz, who branded the IMF'sbalanced-budget prescriptions as ''bad psychology and worseeconomics."

Hostility from Congress forced the Fund into a year-longcampaign to win 18 billion dollars in new U.S. funding. The moneywas approved on condition that the agency - which had confoundedeven Washington's representative on its executive board -disclose the actual state of its finances.

The agency obliged once the money had been approved - and inturn exposed itself to new criticism that it had exaggerated itsneeds.

Those misgivings could undermine its fundraising efforts in thenew year, when Congress will be asked to clear $75 millionin arrears to the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF).The IMF uses this window to offer soft loans so that its poorestmembers can keep up with debt repayments while implementing theFund's prescriptions for economic restructuring.

Lawmakers also could be asked to approve a $250 millionrescue of the IMF's reputation in Asia. The money would go to aU.S. State Department slush fund and, from there, would bechanneled to Asian countries under the Fund's tutelage. It wouldbe used to raise their foreign currency reserves to levels atwhich ''the IMF can say its programmes succeeded,'' says alegislative source. Otherwise, he explains, the countries'reserves will fall short of targets agreed with the Fund.

(Inter Press Service)