Rodrigo Rato selected as IMF's new Managing Director

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Page 133

When he officially begins his five-year term in early June, Rato will be the first Spanish national to serve as Managing Director. Widely credited as the architect of Spain's economic transformation in recent years, Rato, who holds a law degree, an MBA, and a doctorate in economics earned in 2003, comes to the IMF after an accomplished political career in which he served more than two decades in Spain's parliament. From April 2000 to March 2004, he was Spain's Minister of Economy and Vice President of the Government for Economic Affairs, and from May 1996 to 2000, he was Minister of Economy and Finance. Rato is not the first finance minister to serve as IMF Managing Director. The IMF's first head, Camille Gutt (1946-51), and its fifth, H. Johannes Witteveen (1973-81), had been finance ministers in their respective home countries (Belgium and the Netherlands).

In his capacity as Minister of Economy, Rato served as a member of the Boards of Governors of the IMF, the World Bank, the Inter- American Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. He also regularly attended the European Union's (EU's) Economics and Finance Ministers' meetings, and represented the EU at the Group of Seven Finance Ministers' meeting in Ottawa, Canada, in 2002, when Spain held the EU Presidency. As the minister responsible for foreign trade relations, he represented Spain at the World Trade Organization's ministerial meetings in Doha, Qatar, in 2001, and in Cancún, Mexico, in 2003.

At his first press conference at IMF headquarters in Washington on May 11, Rato said the IMF was at "a very important moment in its history"-a moment in which its role as a global institution that...