BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Euro zone finance ministers on Friday began the process of choosing a successor to European Central Bank executive board member Yves Mersch, whose term comes to an end in December.
In a letter, the ECB has asked euro zone finance ministers, meeting for informal talks in Berlin, to start the process.
The chairman of the ministers will invite each euro zone country to present a candidate, if they wish to, over the next month.
Dutch Finance Minister Wopke Hoekstra said the Netherlands would propose Frank Elderson, who has been an Executive Director of Supervision at Dutch central bank since 2011.
Mersch is now also the deputy chair of the ECB’s supervision arm and since there’s no other supervision expert on the ECB board, whoever succeeds him is likely to take on the supervisory role as well.
The six-person executive board of the bank manages its day-to-day operations and members are appointed for 8-year terms that cannot be renewed.
At the next euro zone ministers’ meeting one of the candidates will be chosen with a simple majority of votes, where each euro zone country has one vote.
The candidate will then have a hearing in the European Parliament, which cannot block any candidacies, and be formally appointed by European Union leaders at their summit in December.
(Additional reporting by Bart Meijer in Amsterdam and Balazs Koranyi in Frankfurt; Reporting by Jan Strupczewski; editing by Jason Neely)
