Two memorandums lie at the heart of the charge that Paul Wolfowitz, the World Bank president, was guilty of a serious failure of corporate governance when he secured an attractive secondment package for a bank official with whom he was romantically involved.

The memorandums, dated July 27 2005 and August 11 2005, were among about a hundred pages of documents relating to the Shaha Riza affair released at the instruction of the bank's board yesterday.