Chief Resigns From Bank Formed to Aid Ex-East Bloc : Finance: A report showed the institution spent $300 million on its headquarters. The sum was over twice what it had disbursed to its clients.

LONDON —  Jacques Attali, the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development who was assailed for spending more on the bank than on its impoverished Eastern European clients, resigned Friday.

The bank was set up by more than 50 nations to channel money into former Soviet Bloc countries that now are trying to create market-based economies.

But investigations in April showed that the bank had spent some $300 million on its London headquarters, more than twice the sum that it had disbursed to its East Bloc clients. Among the questionable expenditures was more than $1 million for Italian marble for the bank lobby.

Algerian-born Attali, 50, was a protege of French President Francois Mitterrand and was appointed president of the bank after a career in politics and finance in France. An intellectual and writer, he became head of the bank in May, 1990, when it was established in London to create capital for East Bloc projects.

But Attali’s personal, high style carried over into bank activities, and he was severely criticized for his institution’s palatial furnishings and for his pricey jaunts around Europe in private jets. He also spent almost $100,000 on a staff Christmas party--at a time when bank funds remained generally immobile while investment possibilities were being studied.

When the extent of Attali’s expenditures on the bank became known, the British and American governments, among others, registered objections.

As recently as Friday, the Financial Times reported Attali was reimbursed twice for a first-class round-trip flight to Tokyo--he was paid by the bank and by the host of a conference in Japan, where he also received $30,000 for making a speech. Attali said the double payment was the result of a clerical error.

In his resignation, Attali declared that “the bank has come under increasing negative press attention in recent months. . . . Unfortunately, this attention has begun to have a detrimental effect on the bank’s work and on its staff.”

Attali was also involved in a controversy over his recently published memoirs of his time as an aide to Mitterrand when Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel questioned quotations attributed to him by Attali.