Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer has approved Durmus Yilmaz as the new governor of Türkiye's Central Bank, Economy Minister Ali Babacan announced Tuesday.
Yilmaz, 59, trained in Britain and joined the Central Bank in 1980. He has served on its monetary policy committee since 2004. He told reporters he would maintain the strict anti-inflation framework tied to an IMF economic program, citing targets of 5 percent inflation by end-2006 and 4 percent by end-2007.
Sezer, a committed secularist, had previously blocked the government's first nominee, Adnan Buyukdeniz, head of AlBaraka Turk, an interest-free bank established with Arab funding. That rejection reignited debate over whether Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government, rooted in political Islam, harbors a hidden agenda against Türkiye's secular order.
The central bank had been under interim leadership since 14 March, when former governor Sureyya Serdengecti completed his five-year term. During that period, chronic inflation fell from triple digits to single digits for the first time in roughly 30 years, aided by a 10-billion-dollar IMF loan.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in April 2006, in its own words.