THE man is a fumbling bundle of contradictions. He controls billions of dollars and walks around with holes in his socks.

He's mild-mannered, painfully polite, and yet his adamant support for the invasion of Iraq suggests a war hawk lives under the crumpled suit. He preaches anti-corruption and good governance, and then approves a high-paying promotion for his girlfriend. Depending on who you talk to, Paul Wolfowitz is a bleeding-heart liberal or a stringent neoconservative.

The man behind the money seems to have everyone fooled.

This weekend, Wolfowitz's coveted position as president of the World Bank is in the balance. On Thursday, 24 executive directors of the bank met to debate the fate of their scandalhit leader. The evidence was clearcut: in 2005, Wolfowitz personally passed a hefty pay package worth nearly 150,000 for his girlfriend, along with guaranteed promotions. In doing so, he broke all the rules. Following lengthy deliberations on Thursday, the board said this was a matter of "great concern" and that they had set up a group to make "early recommendations" on the future of the president. No timeframe was mentioned.

Like everything involving Paul Wolfowitz, it's not going to be simple. His glaring error of judgement in promoting his girlfriend is just the latest embarrassment in a string of controversial decisions taken by Wolfowitz since he was appointed by George Bush to head the bank in 2005.

From the outset, he was an unpopular choice. Deeply unpopular. An in-house survey found that nearly 90% of staff opposed his arrival. The man Bush used to refer to affectionately as 'Wolfie' was widely regarded as a neocon zealot who would use his power to further the political agenda of the Bush administration while neglecting the Bank's mission of helping the developing world.

This view is dismissed by Christopher Hitchens, a Vanity Fair columnist who has entertained the bank president at his home on several occasions. Hitchens says the most surprising thing about Wolfowitz is "that he's a bleeding heart", and that "his instincts are those of a liberal democrat, apart from on national security". His opinion is backed up by Karl Jackson, a part-time consultant to the bank, who says that Wolfowitz "really believes in helping people" and is "a bit of a softie".

But a quick glance through Wolfowitz's lengthy political career offers little to support these impressions. Born in 1943 in Ithaca, New York, to parents Jacob Wolfowitz and Lillian Dundes, the future waradvocate actually started life as a liberal.

He attended civil rights marches and eventually studied for a Ph D in political science at the University of Chicago.

It was there that he began to turn to the right. He attended Leo Strauss's lectures on Plato and Montesquieu and admits that he was significantly influenced by his dissertation adviser, Albert Wohlstetter, an ardent anti-Communist and expert on nuclear-weapons strategy.

In 1969, Wolfowitz went to Washington to work for the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, a group that lobbied Congress to support the construction of an anti-ballistic weapons system. From there, he did a stint teaching at Yale before joining the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Three years later, he became a member of Team B, a group of independent experts who had been invited by the then CIA director, George Bush Sr, to advise on Soviet military intentions.

Wolfowitz was sceptical of the notion of closer co-operation between the US and the Soviet Union on nuclear matters, embraced a national missile-defence system and argued for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

Eventually, he made it to the position of deputy secretary of defence in the Bush Administration.

And it was in this capacity that he became one of the principal architects and strongest supporters of the war in Iraq. He fervently believed that the American troops would be hailed as liberators by the Iraqi people, and that a mere 100,000 soldiers would be sufficient to get the job done.

Wolfowitz was wrong, but never talked about being wrong.

It was this silence that got him his current position, in the view of Kenneth Adelman, a Republican foreign-policy expert and prominent neoconservative. "He wanted to be a statesman and get a job like the World Bank presidency, " said Adelman. "He didn't get the job as a reward for keeping quiet, but he got it as a consequence of [it]."

Almost immediately, Wolfowitz's relationship with girlfriend Shaha Ali Riza began to cause problems. She was working in the bank's Middle East and North Africa department, and under the bank's regulations, spouses or partners are prohibited from supervising one another.

Despite this, Wolfowitz asked that she be allowed maintain her job, and work with him as necessary. When that failed, she received a promotion, a huge pay rise and was seconded to the State Department in Washington. "It really gave a bad impression, especially for somebody who was making a big issue of good governance, " a former senior official at the bank told the New Yorkermagazine recently.

Certainly, good governance and anticorruption have been a recurring theme during Wolfowitz's tenure as president. In September 2005, to the shock of bank employees, he withdrew a monetary package for Uzbekistan that was about to be presented to the bank's board for approval without consulting even the vice-president of the region. The decision came just months after the Uzbek government had ordered the US to remove its troops from the military base it had been using in the country. But Wolfowitz insisted his decision had nothing to do with politics. "My one concern was that, given human rights violations, we couldn't have any confidence in what was happening to our money, " he said.

More anti-corruption decisions followed.

In the first half of last year, Wolfowitz suspended aid projects in India, Kenya and Cambodia until allegations of corruption were resolved. But while the new president forged on in his good governance crusade, bank shareholders and bank officials were openly questioning whether his motives were political rather than economic. Some corrupt countries were suffering while others were continuing to feed from the World Bank trough. Under a storm of protests and allegations Wolfowitz was forced to lay out a criteria for withholding aid, and following further criticism, he was forced to make a number of fundamental concessions to the original criteria.

Eventually, he agreed that the bank should suspend lending to a particular country only in "exceptional" circumstances. But Wolfowitz insisted he did not regard this as a defeat. Instead, he played down the scope of his anti-corruption crusade, saying that he "didn't think it was an initiative" and that he had only decided to pursue corruption at the request of bank employees.

Now, the world watches on and Wolfowitz waits nervously for the decision of the bank. Officially, the board members are looking only at this latest scandal. Unofficially, they will surely discuss . . . and take into account - the erratic history of the man who has baffled Washington.

C.V.

Born: 22 December 1943 in the university town of Ithaca, New York Profession: President of the World Bank Married to: Divorced, actually. Currently dating a secular Muslim woman in her 50s, Shaha Ali Riza In the News Because: He helped Riza get transferred to a high-paying job at the State Department. She now gets paid more than US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice