Will Strauss-Kahn Fight for IMF Job?

The Washington Post reports

Confined to a jail cell, his reputation in tatters and facing serious criminal charges, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is almost certainly on his way out as head of the International Monetary Fund.

The main question is whether he’ll go willingly.

Complex legal and institutional negotiations are set to take place in coming days as the IMF aims to resolve the crisis as smoothly as possible. Yet Strauss-Kahn may have the opposite incentive: Holding on a little longer could play to his financial advantage, while resigning too soon could feed a public perception of guilt.

“He is obviously not in a position to run the IMF,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday in New York, where Strauss-Kahn is being held on charges that he sexually assaulted and tried to rape a hotel maid.

Geithner’s blunt assessment will likely escalate the pressure on Strauss-Kahn to step down. The Frenchman, who has led the IMF for more than three years, has already survived a reprimand for having had an improper relationship with a subordinate.

“I can’t think of a corporate executive in today’s world who could survive this situation,” said Robert Bennett, the lawyer who represented President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair and Paul Wolfowitz before he resigned from the World Bank, the IMF’s sister institution, in 2007.

“Think of this as a company. They would say: ‘We’ll lose customers, the media will kill us, the women’s movement will go crazy and whatever the claims he might have, we’ll look responsible if we get rid of this guy.’”

Strauss-Kahn has said nothing about his future at the IMF, and the fund has said little in return. IMF spokesman William Murray said Tuesday that the organization hasn’t even spoken with Strauss-Kahn since his arrest Sunday, but “it will be important to be in contact with him in due course.” Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers have contested the charges against him.