IMF Europe Unit Chief ( former Vice Chairman Goldman Sachs) Quits After One Year Amid Debt Crisis - by Sandrine Rastello

The head of the International Monetary Fund’s European department quit less than a year into the job and was replaced by an in-house economist as the European debt crisis worsens.

Antonio Borges, a Portuguese native whose unit oversees bailouts in the euro region, left for “personal reasons,” the Washington-based IMF said today in an e-mailed statement. His successor is Reza Moghadam, who has made his career at the fund and headed the strategy department.

The management change comes as the IMF, which is co- financing bailouts in Greece, Portugal and Ireland, is preparing to send a team to Italy for an unprecedented audit of the country’s efforts to cut its debt. Borges, a former vice chairman at Goldman Sachs International, last month retracted comments he made about the fund’s possible involvement in the European bond market. He couldn’t immediately be reached for comment today. “He has been a person who has been perhaps not particularly careful about his message discipline” at a time of “acute sensitivity for the IMF” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. 

IMF

Note EU-Digest: the EU would do well to "sanitize" all EU financial units and cooperating organizations of Goldman Sachs insiders or former executives.

For more: IMF Europe Unit Chief Quits After One Year Amid Debt Crisis - Businessweek