In today’s Boston Globe, Janine R. Wedel, professor of public policy at George Mason University, argues that “when [Larry] Summers’s legacy is examined, he should be held to account for his role in a scandal with which he was intimately involved, both as a Treasury official and at Harvard.”

We think of the Shleifer scandal as the story of Andrei Shleifer’s double-dealings in Russia and Larry Summers’ attempts to protect Shleifer from any punishment, either from the federal government or from Harvard.

But Wedel, who has been writing about this scandal since at least 1998, makes another accusation that I hadn’t heard before [italics added]: As Treasury secretary, “Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard gain noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials. Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard gain noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials…. The endowment funds of both Harvard and Yale gained access to valuable investments through networks inhabited by Shleifer and/or his currency-trading wife. His investments in Russia, which he does not deny, included securities, equities, oil and aluminum companies, real estate, and mutual funds — many of the same areas in which he was being paid to provide impartial advice.”

As excellent as David McClintick’s article in Institutional Investor was, it sounds like the Shleifer scandal goes even deeper that McClintick portrayed it. (Which just goes to show how much timing has to do with the impact of an article; perhaps Wedel should have written something just after Bill Kirby was fired.)

I don’t know how much of this Wedel covers in her book, “Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe…”

Anyone?