SUNS 4351 Tuesday 12 January 1999

Washington, Jan (IPS/Abid Aslam) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF), its name pilloried and invoked even by thieves, wants greater public sympathy in the new year.

To help it win friends and influence people, the Fund is hiring public relations (PR) industry leaders whose clients include oil companies plagued with environmental and human-rights problems and whose exploits include manufacturing consent for the 1991 Gulf War.

"We want to strengthen public understanding of the IMF's mission, and to this end we are seeking the advice of outside specialists to learn how we might do more to explain ourselves better," says Shailendra Anjaria, director of external relations. Fund staffers often complain that their work has met unprecedented visibility - and vilification - since July 1997, when the collapse of Thailand's currency set off a financial crisis that now threatens global recession. In a growing number of stricken countries where the IMF now ministers austerity programmes, the agency's name is associated with deprivation - and sometimes depravity.

Last June, for example, three robbers entered a restaurant in Bangkok, the Thai capital, and announced: "This is the IMF era. Give us your money and we'll pay it back later." Patrons burst out laughing, according to reports at the time, forcing one of the thieves to fire gunshots at the ceiling to show them this was no joke. The IMF is dead serious about its image problem, hiring Edelman Public Relations World-wide and market researchers Wirthlin World-wide to spend the next six months gauging public opinion about the Fund and conducting in-depth interviews with 400 key individuals in 18 countries, before recommending ways to put the agency in a more favourable public light.

The Fund has 87 staffers assigned to 'Information and Liaison' functions and has a 1999 external relations budget of $24 million, according to the agency's latest annual report.

Fund officials who have pressed borrowing countries to be more open about their finances, decline to say how much the Edelman- Wirthlin project will cost - as do the companies. Fund sources say they are respecting the norms of business confidentiality. Company sources have told reporters the IMF told them to keep quiet.

"They're probably spending between 100,000 dollars and one million dollars," says John Stauber, editor of the quarterly 'PR Watch'. Kevin McCauley, an industry analyst at the O'Dwyer's publishing company, puts the likely price tag at 200,000-500,000 dollars.

Those estimates do not cover advertising or the creation of 'third parties' to lobby on behalf of a client or cause. Such gimmicks are widely favoured by the public relations industry, according to Stauber.

Examples include 'Citizens for a Free Kuwait', a coalition created to help build support for U.S. leadership in the 1991 Gulf War. Wirthlin provided key market research with which consultants from another company assembled the coalition and counselled the Kuwaiti ambassador here on how to appear sympathetic and trustworthy when appearing on U.S. television, according to Stauber.

Wirthlin's more prominent clients include the Republican National Committee, the organisational heart of the U.S. Republican Party. Republican back-benchers have been among the IMF's most vocal opponents here and Wirthlin "might also help the IMF with some access, influence and insights in dealing with attacks from the right wing," says Stauber.

Edelman was founded in 1952 and has 60 affiliates around the world. The company describes itself as a global leader in 'reputation management'. It defines this as "the orchestration of discrete communications initiatives, designed to promote and protect one of a company's most important assets - its corporate reputation - and to help shape an effective corporate image."

Edelman's top executives include Michael Deaver, former media advisor to President Ronald Reagan. The company has counselled Exxon Corp. over oil spills and Unocal Corp. over its presence in Burma, McCauley says.
Other clients include British American Tobacco and government agencies from Chile, Colombia, India, and Portugal.

IMF officials hope the companies will help to deal with criticism of their handling of crisis in Asia (where decades of social progress have been reversed amid economic contraction), Russia (where the government defaulted on some foreign debts mere weeks after the IMF marshalled 22 billion dollars in international loans), and Brazil (where a deal struck with the central government is mired in disputes at state level).

The Fund also has been criticised for being, in Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs's famous quip, "more secretive than the CIA", or Central Intelligence Agency. Edelman could prove useful in this regard. In 1995, with the U.S. spy agency embroiled in scandals involving Soviet moles, sex-discrimination lawsuits and human rights abuses, 'Time' magazine published the following advice from Edelman Vice Chairman Leslie Dach: "Give people information before it is beaten out of you."

Brickbats come not only from grassroots groups and other familiar foes but also from prominent economists, including World Bank Senior Vice President Joseph Stiglitz, who branded the IMF's balanced-budget prescriptions as "bad psychology and worse economics."

Hostility from Congress forced the Fund into a year-long campaign to win $18 billion in new U.S. funding. The money was approved on condition that the agency - which had confounded even Washington's representative on its executive board - disclose the actual state of its finances.

The agency obliged once the money had been approved - and in turn exposed itself to new criticism that it had exaggerated its needs.
Those misgivings could undermine its fund-raising efforts in the new year, when Congress will be asked to clear $75 million in arrears to the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF). The IMF uses this window to offer soft loans so that its poorest members can keep up with debt repayments while implementing the Fund's prescriptions for economic restructuring.

Lawmakers also could be asked to approve a $250 million rescue of the IMF's reputation in Asia. The money would go to a US State Department slush fund and, from there, would be channelled to Asian countries under the Fund's tutelage. It would be used to raise their foreign currency reserves to levels at which "the IMF can say its programmes succeeded," says a legislative source. Otherwise, he explains, the reserves of the countries will fall short of targets agreed with the
Fund.