French-born Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn became the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) tenth Managing Director in November 2007.
Unlike most of his predecessors at the helm of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn - also known as DSK to his fellow Frenchmen - is not a banker and has no known affiliations to banking entities. Instead, he had worked as a politician and as a university professor. (Whitney, 2011).
His term was remarkable because of three different extraordinary facts, namely:
1. Less than a year after his arrival at the IMF, a worldwide financial crisis of considerable proportions took place. (Chossudovsky, 2011).A Sex Scandal at the Highest Levels
2. As a member of the French Socialist Party, DSK was widely believed to harbor aspirations to run for the highest political office in France, i.e. the Presidency, in the elections that were scheduled for 2012. He was regarded as a competitive challenger who would contend against the then incumbent President Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa, candidate of the conservative-leaning UMP Party - Union for a Popular Movement - (Weisenthal, 2011).
3. His skill as IMF Managing Director was praised for being a "sagacious leader" (Stiglitz, 2011) and, replaying the role of the legendary Austrian Prince and statesman, DSK was described as "Metternich with a Blackberry" for his bright maneuvers to establish a "system of interlocking interests" in order to ensure that stability and balance, understood in both financial and political terms, could prevail (Johnson, 2010).
Nevertheless, DSK's promising career, in both the IMF and French politics was abruptly undermined in New York, on May 14, 2011 when he was arrested and charged with sexual assault and attempted rape of Guinean-born Sofitel Hotel chambermaid Nafissatou Diallo. Shortly afterwards - on May 18, 2011, DSK tendered his resignation from the IMF. He was swiftly replaced by French Finance Minister Christine Madeleine Odette Lagarde. DSK pleaded not guilty and, eventually, all charges were dismissed (Los Angeles Times, 2011) after even public prosecutors became unable to believe the accuser's words (BBC, 2011).
Was this incident just another high-profile sex scandal, similar to the ones involving former US President William Jefferson Clinton, former US Democratic Senator John Reid Edwards, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, former Israeli President Moshe Katzav, former President of the World Bank Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency David Howell Petraeus, et al. or . . . is there more than meets the eye at play? As an educated guess, this research paper is meant to provide a plausible answer.
Comment: Perhaps we should ask ourselves, what, if anything, the world has really learned from the life struggles of Nelson Mandela.