Not in race for IMF top job, says Montek

NEW DELHI: Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia has struck down speculations about him being in the race for the post of IMF chief and clarified that he was not a candidate .

“It (the speculation) is completely false. I don’t know what is the basis of this. I am not a candidate. This is some speculative thing in the New York Times,” Mr Ahluwalia told reporters at an event to mark five years of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) on Friday. Current IMF managing director Dominique Strauss Kahn on Thursday said the next chief would be from a developing country.

Mr Strauss-Kahn had said that the so-called agreement between the US and Europe whereby the IMF head was European and World Bank president was an American was over. “So I think it would be just fair that the next leaders of the two institutions will come from somewhere else in the world,” Mr Strauss-Kahn had said in New Delhi.

Mr Ahluwalia’s name as a possible candidate for the IMf chief’s post cropped up in a recent report in The New York Times. The other frontrunners for the post named in the article included former heads of central banks of Brazil and Mexico, Arminio Fraga and Guillermo Ortiz.