Once, when speaking about her experience as a competitive synchronised swimmer in school, Ms Christine Lagarde famously quipped: "It was synchronised swimming that taught me: Grit your teeth and smile."
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief will have a lot more gritting of teeth to do, especially after a French court charged her last week with negligence when she was finance minister under then President Nicolas Sarkozy. The 58-year-old has been steadfast in maintaining her innocence, making it clear in her trademark no-nonsense style that she was not about to let the case derail her work.
"I'm going back to work in Washington this afternoon," she said shortly after her own office announced the charges and despite having been questioned for 15 hours by a French court.
"After three years of investigations, dozens of hours of questioning, the commission realised that I was not complicit in any violation and has therefore been reduced to allege that I may not have been sufficiently vigilant in the arbitration," she told reporters at her lawyer's office in Paris.
The charges in question have to do with her alleged role in a multimillion-euro arbitration payout in 2008. She had stepped in earlier to order a long-running legal tussle between businessman Bernard Tapie and now-defunct state bank Credit Lyonnais to go to private arbitration. The matter was then settled out of court with Credit Lyonnais - its liabilities at that point owned by a state-owned consortium - paying Mr Tapie some €400 million (S$656 million). At the heart of the controversy is whether the arbitration process was rigged in Mr Tapie's favour as a reward for his support of Mr Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election.
For all her protestations of innocence, the charges against Ms Lagarde still threaten to blemish one of the most storied careers in global governance.
Ms Lagarde currently stands among an elite circle of women who have risen to the very top - a group that includes the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Brazilian President Dilma Roussef.
As is the case with most of the women in this group, her rise features numerous unconventional turns and plenty of glass-ceiling demolition.
Soon after her father, a professor of English, died when she was just 17, Ms Lagarde moved from France to the United States to attend the posh Holton-Arms School in Maryland, returning later to France to study law. She then joined the international law firm Baker & McKenzie where she rose through the ranks to become its first female chairman in 1999.
Her foray into politics began six years later when she was appointed to the Cabinet. She held several portfolios, including finance - again becoming the first woman to hold that post.
It is perhaps her appointment as IMF chief in 2011 that was the most difficult to land. Her campaign for the position of managing director - left vacant after her countryman Dominique Strauss-Kahn was embroiled in a sex scandal - faced some major obstacles. In particular, her candidacy was hobbled by a sense that developing nations had grown weary of the European stranglehold on the top job. And notwithstanding her self-confessed lack of mathematical expertise, there was also the problem of gender. "Imagine a room with 24 men and you're the only woman," she told Vogue magazine about the interview process. "The first day, I had to meet with each of them separately, 20 minutes each and then five minutes in-between time... Then the next day, all 24, the whole boys' club, for a grilling."
And when she secured the job, she found she had to spend much of her early years at IMF managing a series of financial crises.
Those who know Ms Lagarde say she is unique in that she has never had to make it in what is a male-dominated sector by becoming more like a man. She is incredibly charming.
Mr Dominique Moisi, founder of the French Institute of International Relations, described it this way to The Guardian: "She knows how important she is, but she's quite warm in spite of everything. She can be funny when she knows she needs to be funny."
Given her profile, it is not surprising that Ms Lagarde speaks up unabashedly for women's rights.
During her speech at the 2012 commencement ceremony of Harvard Kennedy School, she spoke of how she had walked away from her first interview at a law firm.
"I was told that I would never make partner. When I asked why, they told me it was because I was a woman. So I thanked them, walked out the door, and never looked back. Tough luck, they did not deserve me," she said.
For now, at least, Ms Lagarde has the support of the IMF board. "The board has been briefed on this matter on a regular basis," IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said last week. "On each of those occasions they have expressed confidence in the ability of the managing director to effectively carry out her duties."
This article was first published on September 01, 2014.
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