Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned

Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned Wednesday as head of the International Monetary Fund after explosive accusations that he had sexually attacked a housekeeper in a Midtown Manhattan hotel room.

“It is with infinite sadness that I feel compelled today to present to the Executive Board my resignation from my post of managing director of the I.M.F.,” he said in a statement dated Wednesday and issued shortly after midnight by the I.M.F. “I think at this time first of my wife — whom I love more than anything — of my children, of my family, of my friends.”

His resignation comes four days after Mr. Strauss-Kahn was taken off an Air France plane at Kennedy International Airport and arrested in connection with the accusations, and a day after Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, called for his resignation.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a former French finance minister, had been expected to declare his candidacy for the French presidency soon. He was seen as one of the people figure most likely to oust President Nicolas Sarkozy.

In issuing his resignation Wednesday, Mr. Strauss-Kahn said, “I want to say that I deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations that have been made against me.”

News of the arrest produced an earthquake of shock, outrage, disbelief and embarrassment throughout France.

Though Mr. Strauss-Kahn received generally high marks for his stewardship of the bank, his reputation was tarnished in 2008 by an affair with a Hungarian economist who was a subordinate there. The fund decided to stand by him despite concluding that he had shown poor judgment. He issued an apology to employees at the bank and his wife, Anne Sinclair, an American-born French journalist.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s extramarital affairs have long been considered an open secret. But the legal charges against him — which include attempted rape, forced oral sex and an effort to sequester another person against her will — are of an entirely different magnitude, even in France and elsewhere in continental Europe, where voters have generally shown more lenience than Americans toward the sexual behavior of prominent politicians, most notably the sexual escapades of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s resignation now sets off the jockeying for his replacement. The French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, is considered the leading candidate to succeed Mr. Strauss-Kahn, her friend and colleague. Her straight talk has helped burnish Ms. Lagarde’s reputation as one of Europe’s most influential ambassadors in the world of international finance.

Her main competition, analysts say, is Kemal Dervis, a former finance minister of Turkey. Mr. Dervis is credited with rescuing the Turkish economy after it was hit by a devastating financial crisis in 2001, in part by securing a multibillion-dollar loan from the I.M.F. Before that, Mr. Dervis worked at the World Bank for 24 years.

In the meantime, the I.M.F. said in its statement Wednesday night that John Lipsky would remain as acting managing director.

While at the helm of the I.M.F., Mr. Strauss-Kahn, an economist and politician, had used the European debt crisis to seize, somewhat audaciously, a new and prominent role for the world body. Trying to shed its old image as a hidebound policy task master, the fund refashioned itself as the investment bank of multilateral institutions — doing whatever it took to get the deal done.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn was a leading member of France’s Socialist Party when he was chosen by the newly elected Mr. Sarkozy, a conservative, to be the head of the fund, a job that has traditionally been given to a European.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest came 10 minutes before his plane was due to depart, at about 4:40 p.m., when two detectives of the Port Authority suddenly boarded Air France Flight 23, as the plane idled at the departure gate.

The police were called to the hotel about 1:30 p.m. on May 14, but when they arrived, Mr. Strauss-Kahn had already checked out. At some point, Mr. Strauss-Kahn called the hotel and said that his cellphone was missing. Police detectives then coached hotel employees to tell him, falsely, that they had the telephone, according to the law enforcement official. Mr. Strauss-Kahn said he was at Kennedy Airport and about to get on a plane.