IMF Managing Director detained in NY on charges of sexual harassment

NEW YORK, May 15 (Itar-Tass) - Police in New York City have detained
and taken to custody the Managing Director of the International Monetary
Fund, Dominique Strauss Kahn, The New York Time said.
He was taken off an Air France flight bound for Paris as the jet was
idling on the tarmac at the airport some ten minutes before it was
scheduled to take off.
Strauss Kahn is accused of "a brutal attack on a woman employee at the
hotel Sofitel New York".
"Strauss-Kahn had been considered a leading contender to run on the
Socialist Party's ticket against President Nicolas Sarkozy" in the
presidential election due in France in 2012.
A former economics professor, Strauss-Kahn rose to political
prominence first as a deputy in parliament in the 1980's and then as a
finance minister under socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, a post he
held until 1999, The New York Times said.
He eventually "sought the socialist party's presidential nomination
himself in 2007 - calling for an "anti-Sarkozy front" - but lost to
Segolene Royal," the article said.
"Months later he was tapped to run the IMF and received Sarkozy's
support, which many critics called a strategy by Sarkozy to keep
Strauss-Kahn away from the forefront of the socialist party," the
newspaper said.
Saturday's arrest is far from the first scandal around Straus Kahn's
personality, it went on.
"In 2008 he was embroiled in a controversy after accusations arose
that he had had a sexual relationship with one of his subordinates,
Piroska Nagy, a senior official in the I.M.F.'s Africa Department."
The IMF hired a law firm to launch an investigation, and Nagy left the
fund and went to work for the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development.
"With the IMF needed to quell the international economic meltdown, Mr.
Strauss-Kahn was kept on the job," The New York Times said. He later
apologized for an "error in judgment."