Over the past year, Neha Wadekar and I unearthed a whistleblower's shocking claim of a cover-up of a child sex abuse scandal, a who's who of international do-good financiers, and a for-profit education chain operating mostly in Africa called Bridge International Academies. An investigator working for the World Bank was stymied and retaliated against. We got notes from a critical phone call between World Bank officials and company executives showing a plan to "neutralize Adler" " the lead internal investigator who had uncovered the allegations " and to slow down the process. "Time matters," as one person on the call put it. "Need to delay until Series F." (That's a name for a financing round.) Following our reporting, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., sent multiple letters to the World Bank, warning the new president that how he responded to the scandal would be used by Congress as a proxy for his broader seriousness about reforming the bank. "We view the Bridge case as a litmus test for the conversation currently taking place around IFC's responsibility to remedy social and environmental harm caused by its projects, especially those where IFC is not following its own policies," the senators wrote. Bridge International Academies was backed by the World Bank's IFC, as well as prominent Silicon Valley and venture capital leaders, including private funds linked to Bill Ackman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Pierre Omidyar.
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