WASHINGTON, April 14: Beleaguered World Bank boss Paul Wolfowitz, embarrassed by new revelations over a pay scandal, faced mounting calls on Friday to resign but won fresh backing from the White House. The former US deputy defense secretary was in the firing line as finance ministers from the wealthy Group of Seven (G7) nations kicked off a weekend of high-level meetings here now overshadowed by the controversy.

Wolfowitz, 63, was under pressure to end his stormy two-year tenure after bank directors dismantled key planks of his defense over startling pay hikes given by the development lender to his Libyan-born girlfriend, Shaha Riza.

We'll have to see if Wolfowitz will be able to retain the moral authority necessary to fulfill his duties, Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega said in Washington.

But a day after Wolfowitz was booed in a meeting with World Bank staff who were demanding his resignation, President George W. Bush stood firm behind an old colleague who was one of the architects of the war in Iraq.

The president fully supports Wolfowitz and wants him to continue his service as World Bank president, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

While the World Bank's board has the power to fire a president for grave misconduct, in practice the lender's chief is a US political appointee and his fate will be decided by governments, not least in Washington and in Europe.

After a day-long emergency meeting Thursday, the World Bank's 24 executive directors were likely to meet again Sunday, in parallel to its annual spring meeting, a European source said.

The ball is objectively in the president's court, the source added, declining to be named.

More than 100 pages of documents released with a board statement revealed that on Wolfowitz's personal direction, Riza was given raises that took her annual pay package to nearly 200,000 dollars when she was reassigned from the World Bank's Middle East press office to the US State Department.

Riza remained on the World Bank payroll during her external assignment, which was to forestall any conflicts of interest after Wolfowitz took charge of the bank in June 2005.

In their statement, the executive directors said they would “move expeditiously to reach a conclusion on possible actions to take.””In their consideration of the matter, the executive directors will focus on all relevant governance implications for the bank,” added the directors, who are representatives of national governments including from the US and Europe.

The controversy is a deep embarrassment for Wolfowitz just as he battles to overcome skepticism about his campaign against corruption in the 185-member World Bank's lending, which reached nearly 24 billion dollars last year.

The newly released documents included an August 2005 memorandum in which Wolfowitz ordered the bank's human resources division to award Riza a series of extraordinary promotions and pay increases.

Contrary to accounts given by Wolfowitz's office, the board said that neither it nor the World Bank's ethics committee had approved the arrangement.—AFP