  The strong sensitivity of the transmission phase through a quantum dot
embedded into one arm of a two-wave Aharonov-Bohm interferometer to the Kondo
effect is explained. The enhancement takes place because of the buildup of the
exchange scattering on the dot due to Kondo correlations even much above
$T_{K}$. The enhanced exchange competes with the potential scattering, which is
always weak. Both cases of the Anderson impurity model and a multilevel quantum
dot are considered. In the latter case in addition to the description of
peculiar phase behavior a mechanism leading to ferromagnetic Kondo coupling in
quantum dots is proposed.
