N Sundaresha Subramanian reporting:

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) does not need a new chief – at least for the next two years. However, the race to be the successor for IMF Managing Director Christian Lagarde has quietly begun.  On Thursday, the Singapore government announced that deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam would take over as chairman of the Economic Development Board (EDB)’s International Advisory Council (IAC) from May 1. Tharman, also the finance minister, will replace Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean, who has served as the council’s chairman since 2007.

Tharman’s appointment to the post, which will see him more active in the international arena and lift his impressive profile further, is seen as a step towards the race to Washington DC headquarters of IMF. The IAC has chiefs of multinationals such as Philips, Shell and Glaxo. Anand Mahindra, managing director of Mahindra group CEO, Ajay Banga, MasterCard, are members of IAC.

However, the buzz on Tharman’s candidature was created by economist and UK House of Lords member Lord Meghnad Desai, who argued it was time for a non-European to take charge of the IMF. “Mr Tharman is an IMF insider, the chairman of International Monetary and Financial Committee… Mr Tharman is Singapore’s deputy prime minister and a previous chief Monetary Authority of Singapore. He is a member of prestigious Group of Thirty. You cannot get a better CV than that.”

Desai’s pointed out that the IMF has not been as alive to problems of the majority of its members as it should have been. He also hoped that a non-European like Tharman would be in a position to give the US some “stiff talking”.

In the run-up to the 2011 appointment of Lagarde, OMFIF had endorsed the candidature of Zeti Akhtar Aziz, the governor of Malaysian central bank, for the post. However, Aziz herself did not show much interest.

Tharman was appointed chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee, the policy steering committee of the IMF, in March 2011. He was also admitted to the Group of Thirty, also known as The Consultative Group on International Economic and Monetary Affairs, in June 2008.