It's not much longer. I'll go as quickly as I can. Thank you for that.
I would say that the thing to understand here, the key point, is that the AIIB president's office is unusually powerful, even in the context of a multilateral organization. It's extremely top-down, and that office is a cocoon that is physically cut off, and it is dominated by senior Communist Party members.
Heel-clicking obedience, as I would describe it, to the president's office is valued more highly than any other virtue at the bank, including, notably, freedom of expression or thinking differently than other people do, which is kind of ironic when you consider that it's a multilateral organization.
I think you have to realize that externally, over and over again, AIIB says that it's an apolitical independent organization, but, honestly, internally, the atmosphere there in Beijing is anything but. It's political, and it's CCP political. There's a big difference between those two, and that has helped to create a toxic culture inside of this organization.
When I first resigned last May, citing my concerns about the CCP's pronounced, profound and pervasive influence in the everyday operating business of the bank and its toxic impact on the culture, Mr. Jin, the president, did not accept my resignation. He talked me out of it, and I was kind of shocked that the bank did not deny or confirm my allegations or concerns about CCP influence. I was simply informed that the president's office did not like my raising the taboo CCP topic.
After accepting my second resignation in June, when I left in a hurry for Japan, the bank started attacking me personally. Journalists covering the news of my departure, some of whom I'd known for a long time before I joined the bank, warned me that bank executives were trash talking me off the record, and this was well before any bank investigation took place. Hundreds of pro-AIIB, pro-CCP bots on Twitter targeted me with insults. I was accused of being an American agent of espionage, a white supremacist, a neo-colonialist or part of some nefarious Canadian government plot to embarrass China, which brings me to this.
When I announced my departure from the bank, I did not ask the Government of Canada to do anything, period. I acted in an individual capacity out of what I considered to be ethical responsibility and a patriotic duty, frankly. I have co-operated, though. I have supported the review conducted by the Government of Canada and provided information to the Department of Finance in this regard. Indeed, I note that several of the topics of the extended review mirror concerns that I raised with the Department of Finance on transparent governance, management competence and proper professional culture at the bank.
I'll make this final point. When Mr. Xi proposed the AIIB, he was a relatively new leader, still seen as a potential reformer, maybe somebody like Deng Xiaoping in 1978, but now we have a neo-Maoist leader of China, an authoritarian dictator.
After so much political interference, things look much different than they did then. We all hoped that, by placing this bet on a multilateral institution in China, we could have a window on Asia's development. Well, I think what we have now is a bank for China's influence, where China gets exclusive geopolitical credit for the lending of the bank.