President Andrés Manuel López Obrador questioned the work done by the governor of the Bank of Mexico, Alejandro Díaz de León because he was the one who approved the credit for the purchase, at greatest, of a fertilizer plant in 2015.
At his morning conference, the representative reiterated that the change of governor will take place and that he will propose to a good economist, “a responsible person”.
When questioned about Diaz de León’s work at the helm of Banxico, the president criticized some of the decisions authorized during his management.
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“I do not agree with many technicians of the last government because they caused a lot of damage to the country, the one who is now governor (Alejandro Díaz de León) was the one who approved the credit for the fertilizer plant in 2015, some plants that were acquired at very high prices, we have for that operation a debt of one billion dollars. If they were good technicians, they wouldn’t have carried out these operations, how is that justified? It was up to him to sign the agreement, if he were a good technician he would have reviewed the buy-sell contract and realized it was a bad operation and he would not have signed or accepted it,” he said.
He said the change of governor will not affect economic stability, as some of his opponents have said.
“Friends of the current governor thought that he was going to continue and I read that the news (of the change) had caused instability and had been reflected in the depreciation of the peso, a lie, that day there was a loss in weight but by strengthening the dollar nationally, which always happens, then there is no impact,” he said.
Last Friday, López Obrador brazened the continuity of Alejandro Díaz de León at the helm of Banxico and announced that instead he will propose an economist with a “social dimension”.
To date, the president has appointed two of the five members of Banxico’s board of government, former banker Jonathan Heath and academic Gerardo Esquivel, who was part of the leftist leader’s economic team during his presidential campaign, both in 2019.
For his part, Díaz de León, is a teacher in public education at Yale University, and assumed as governor in December 2017, to complete the period 2016-2021 after the resignation of Agustín Carstens.
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Alejandro Díaz de León was appointed by then-President Enrique Peña Nieto, with whom he also worked for the Ministry of Finance and in the direction of the Bancomext development bank.
Candidates to lead Banxico must be nominated by the president and ratified by the House of Senators.
The periods of governors begin every January 1 of the fourth year of the presidential six-year period, in order to guarantee their autonomy of functions.
With AFP information.
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