ARIS (AFX) - European Central Bank president Wim Duisenberg has no plans to step down early next year, the Wall Street Journal Europe reported, citing people close to Duisenberg.
Colleagues and former colleagues of Duisenberg said he is concerned that the ECB's independence would appear to be compromised if he stepped down shortly after the Jan 1 introduction of euro notes and coins, the newspaper said.
Duisenberg was appointed for an eight-year term which runs until May 2006, but said at the time of his appointment that he would probably not want to serve the full term although he wanted to see through the introduction of notes and coins.
However, he later said he did not plan to retire after four years and might even complete the full term.
Speculation about the successor to Duisenberg has flared up again recently after Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said that he and others had been approached about taking on the ECB presidency. A US academic this week said that euro group president Didier Reynders had told him that he wanted French Finance Minister Laurent Fabius to succeed Duisenberg.
"When Mr Reynders came to the Stanford Business School just after the spring IMF meetings, I talked with him on the subject of ECB presidential succession on a walk across campus," Melvyn Krauss, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, wrote in an article in the Wall Street Journal Europe.
Krauss said Reynders told him that Duisenberg should honour a commitment to retire in 2002 and named Fabius as the best candidate to succeed Duisenberg. In the article, Krauss said that when he mentioned the possibility of Bank of France governor Jean-Claude Trichet succeeding Duisenberg, Reynders "brushed the suggestion aside with visible contempt at the mere mention of Mr Trichet's name". Krauss said politicians want to have a greater say in ECB decisions and therefore do not want Trichet to succeed Duisenberg.