The Government has appointed Soledad Núñez as deputy governor of the Bank of Spain without the support of the Popular Party. She is a person with a long career in the institution, a civil servant, and who was on the verge of entering the top of the organisation on two other occasions: in 2006, the then economic vice-president Pedro Solbes announced Miguel Ángel Fernández Ordóñez as governor when La Moncloa was already predicting Núñez’s name for the post. Through the accomplished facts, Solbes managed to impose his trusted person over Núñez’s candidacy, which was supported by Miguel Sebastián, at that time head of the influential economic office of President Zapatero.
In 2012, the PP minister Luis de Guindos reached an agreement with Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba that Soledad Núñez would be the deputy governor appointed by the PSOE to accompany Luis Linde. But when her name became known, several economists from the socialist party environment, headed by Julio Segura and José Luis Malo de Molina, at that time director of studies at the bank, mobilized and nominated Fernando Restoy, who finally became the deputy governor. Soledad Núñez’s name to occupy the top of the bank was again dropped at the last moment. Two decades after the first time she almost achieved it, Soledad Núñez, born in Badajoz, enters the top of the institution at the age of 67 for a six-year term.
Núñez has a PhD in economics from the prestigious University of Minnesota. Although her profile is more focused on markets and macroeconomics, she was director of the Treasury in the Zapatero government and has experience in the banking sector because at that time she participated in all the changes that were addressed in financial regulation after the 2008 crisis. She was a director of the ill-fated Banco Madrid. And she is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Spain. She is a member of the board of directors of the Bank of Spain, appointed on the proposal of Nadia Calviño, and is a member of its executive committee. So she is already in charge of the day-to-day running of the bank. However, the new governor, José Luis Escrivá, could decide that she should not attend the meetings of the Single Supervisory Mechanism, the body in charge of supervising the major banks in the euro zone, as her predecessor in the post, Margarita Delgado, did. Some sources already suggest that he could opt for someone with a career more closely linked to banking supervision.
Soledad has a long career in technical positions within the bank. She is notable for her participation in the board of Target 2 of the European Central Bank, where asset exchanges between central banks are made. In recent years she has specialised in bank financing of green projects. At the Bank of Spain she is considered a person with a good understanding of management and who knows the structure after having worked in three different areas of the organisation: operations, financial stability and research services.
The Popular Party has refused to participate in this appointment because they believe that Núñez is closely identified with the Socialist Party and that it would be “whitewashing” the appointment of José Luis Escrivá as Governor of the Bank of Spain. He was the holder of the portfolio of Digital Transformation and Public Administration and has made the jump from the Government to the institution, a fact that the Popular Party considers unacceptable because it calls into question the independence of the supervisory body. Although the Government offered them the possibility of appointing a deputy governor, Popular Party sources have assured that they were not going to participate in this “exchange of cards”. In this way, the unwritten pact by which the Government chose the governor and the opposition party, the deputy governor, has been broken. It was already broken in a similar way with Fernández Ordóñez, and this caused the institution to form part of the political fray in the midst of the collapse of the financial system and that it did not find support in the PP.
The Council of Ministers has also approved the appointment of a new director of the Bank of Spain, Jordi Pons i Novell, a man from ERC, professor at the University of Barcelona and author of Fiscal plunder: a premeditated suffocationHer appointment is in response to the Catalan quota that traditionally was occupied by economists from the CiU orbit. She replaces the Harvard doctor and IESE professor, Nuria Mas. The new director who will replace Soledad Núñez on the bank’s board has also been appointed. This is Lucía Rodríguez, a state economist who worked in the Fiscal Authority in economic forecasts and who was chosen by the Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo.
According to sources close to the Bank of Spain, Escrivá has begun a reorganisation of the organisation, creating a new general management department that will be in charge of the governor’s activities, relations with other organisations, institutional relations and communication, headed by Paloma Marín. His deputy will be the person who until now was Escrivá’s director of communication in the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Inés Calderón. Essentially, this is an expansion of his cabinet and, within this new organisation, sources at the bank indicate that the governor could take direct control of the communication of economic forecasts and quarterly reports, even holding the press conference himself, something that was previously done by the research department.
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