Bank of Israel Candidate Mario Blejer Had Side Role in DSK Scandal
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Mario Blejer, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new candidate to become Bank of Israel governor, found himself in a media storm in 2008 after it emerged his wife had had an affair with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund.
Blejer was a senior IMF official at the time, and his second wife Piroska Nagy was a subordinate of Strauss-Kahn at the Fund.
The affair received significant media coverage at the time, with allegations Nagy, a Hungarian economist, received a promotion due to her affair with the IMF chief. She was forced to leave the IMF following the affair. She had been separated from Blejer already, but their marriage dissolved only afterward.
After the affair became public, the IMF board hired a law firm to investigate.
Nagy had complained that Strauss-Kahn pursued her aggressively and said, “I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t.”
For more go to Haaretz
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