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Japan's bid for IMF top job

TOKYO: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has endorsed Japan's bid for the top job at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a renewal of his attacks on Western economic hegemony.

In his monthly Japanese newspaper column published on Monday, Mahathir described Eisuke Sakakibara, a former vice finance minister for international affairs, as broadminded.

Mahathir said Sakakibara, who earned the tag of "Mr Yen" for his sway over currency markets during his time at the finance ministry, "does not confine himself to narrow needs."

"The IMF hasn't done a good job. It is too rigid and eurocentric," the prime minister wrote in the Mainichi Daily News. "It is not looking at the world as a whole but from the view of Europe and the United States.

"It cannot understand Asian ways. For the IMF there is only one way. We need to have a person with a broader world view, not confined to just one ethnic group.

"Sakakibara has enough experience. He has a Western education and is very familiar with Europeans and Americans, as well as Asians," Mahathir wrote.

Since quitting his senior bureaucratic post last July, Sakakibara has been working as a professor at Tokyo's elite Keio University.

In a straw poll by the IMF executive board in Washington last Thursday, Sakakibara won only nine percent of the vote to choose a successor to Michel Camdessus as the Fund's managing director.

Despite US opposition, Germany's deputy finance minister Chio Koch-Weser finished first with 43 percent of the vote, followed by interim IMF managing director Stanley Fisher, a US national, with nearly 12 percent.

Japanese Finance Minister Kiichi Miyazawa hinted after the vote that Sakakibara might have to pullout of the race. The post of IMF managing director is traditionally held by a European while its sister institution the World Bank is headed by an American.

But the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, including Malaysia, has given strong backing to Sakakibara, whose candidacy is seen as a bid by Japan to have an Asian voice heard in the selection process.

Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said Friday the nomination "is a sign that the Japanese are unsatisfied with the existing arrangements and want a look in."

Mahathir, reprising a well-worn theme, said "manipulation" by Western currency traders and not corruption or cronyism was to blame for the wave of currency collapses which hit East Asia in 1997.

Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea were forced to go cap in hand to the IMF for multi-billion-dollar bailouts, but Malaysia took the controversial step of isolating its economy through capital controls. Mahathir said the IMF needed a new voice to respond to specifically Asians needs.

"I know it will be very difficult for him (Sakakbira) to get the position, because the way international civil servants are chosen is not democratic," the Malaysian premier wrote.

"We don't have a say in the IMF or the World Bank, simply because we are weak."ÐAFP