Scott White is former Acting General Counsel and Deputy General Counsel of the World Bank.  His main areas of expertise include integrity and risk management, innovative financial products, and institutional governance.  His paramount goal as a lawyer has been to facilitate his clients’ ability to achieve their business objectives within the legal frameworks within which they operate.  He is accustomed to handling high-pressure, high public visibility challenges that require rapid response times and level-headed thinking.

​

Scott has over 35 years of legal experience, including eight in private practice (1976-1984) and more than 25 with the World Bank (1984-2009).  He was Acting General Counsel of the World Bank Group from April 2008 until March 2009, a period coinciding with the beginning of the global financial crisis and a significant operating realignment within the World Bank Group.  While Deputy General Counsel from 2003-2009, he also acted as General Counsel for eight months.  He served as Counsel to the Audit Committee of the Board of Executive Directors (1999-2009), Counsel to the Budget Committee of the Board (2002-2009) and Member of Management’s Asset-Liability Management Committee (1995-2005) and thus has considerable experience advising both Board members and senior management.   Earlier in his World Bank career, he was Chief Counsel, Corporate Finance, in the Legal Vice Presidency (1990-2003), where he advised the Bank’s Treasury, Controller’s, and Risk Management areas.

 

His integrity-related experience includes his positions as Bank Liaison to the Volcker Panel Reviewing the Effectiveness and Independence of the Department of Institutional Integrity and supervisory group member overseeing Implementation of the Panel Recommendations (January 2007-November 2008).  He also functioned as the organizer and Chair of the World Bank’s Working Group on Sanctions Reform (December 2004-October 2009) and lead lawyer working with the Integrity Vice Presidency 2004-2009.   Scott spearheaded a number of policy-based sanctions reform initiatives during those years, including the introduction of debarment with conditional release and compliance monitoring as sanctions enforcement tools.

 

Scott is credited for having led the Bank’s legal work on the creation of the initial Global Bond in fixed-income markets in the late 1980s, the Prototype Carbon Fund in the late 1990s, and Offset Bonds, new Bank lending instruments with flexible currency options, and the Central Bank Reserve Assets Management Program in the 1990s and early 2000s.

 

In 2015 Scott was hired by the World Bank as a consultant to lead the team that designed and delivered a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Financing for Development: From Billions to Trillions, how to finance the new UN-approved Sustainable Development Goals 2015-2030, which had over 30,000 registered participants from 198 countries and territories.

 

Scott commenced his legal career at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, New York, NY (1976-1979) and then at Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn, Washington D.C (1979-1984), specializing in international financial transactions.  Scott was educated at Columbia Law School, New York, NY (JD 1976) and Princeton University, Princeton, NJ (AB 1973).  He is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia.