BRUSSELS, July 9: EU finance ministers are unlikely to decide at a meeting on Tuesday on a candidate to head the International Monetary Fund, a diplomat with the EU’s Portuguese presidency said on Monday.

European countries are searching for a replacement for current IMF managing director Rodrigo Rato after the Spaniard’s surprise announcement at the end of last month that he intended to step down in October.

By tradition Europe chooses the head of the IMF and the United States picks the president of the World Bank, the IMF’s sister institution.

“I do expect a broad exchange of views among ministers concerning the name of the man to be at the helm of the IMF,” the diplomat said.

Although there had already been “quite a few informal contacts and these contacts will continue,” the diplomat added that “I do not expect to have a name coming out of the meeting.”

In the run-up to the regular meeting of EU finance ministers on Tuesday in Brussels, several French, Italian and Polish names had been circulating as possible successors to Rato.French President Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed senior Socialist and former French finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

France has had its fair share of IMF heads as Frenchmen have led the institution for more than 30 of its 61 years of existence, and are also in charge of the European Central Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

The Wall Street Journal newspaper last Thursday named Italian Economy Minister Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa and the governor of the Bank of Italy, Mario Draghi, as possible candidates.

The Financial Times newspaper in Britain cited two Poles, former central bank president Leszek Balcerowicz and former prime minister Marek Belka, as potential contenders.

Developing countries for years have protested in vain against the tradition of Europeans running the IMF and Americans leading the World Bank and have called for an open competition for both posts.

Rato’s surprise exit from the IMF comes at a sensitive moment as the institution struggles to find its bearings amid an internal reform launched by Rato himself and as more and more countries opt not to borrow from it.

European Commission spokeswoman Amelia Torres said: “We hope that European Union countries will find a suitable candidate very soon to continue the very important reform process underway.”

However, she ruled out a non-European to head the IMF, saying: “We would like the European countries to agree on a European candidate.”—AFP