Isarescu to personally supervise exchange rate interventions

Governor Mugur Isarescu chose to personally take over supervision of forex and monetary market operations, a department part of the portfolio of former deputy governor Eugen Dijmarescu in the past, who was surprisingly replaced with Bogdan Olteanu as voted by Parliament.

From this position, Isarescu will directly supervise exchange rate interventions, cash injections on the monetary market, as well as the management of the over 28 billion-euro foreign exchange reserve and the placement of the almost 104 tonnes of gold that the NBR owns.

After Olteanu became a member of the Board of Governors, the internal structure of the National Bank of Romania was reorganised, although out of the four executives, three had also been members of the team that ended its term in October.

Olteanu, 38, a lawyer by trade, is now in charge of the statistics and information technology services (supervised by Dijmarescu in the past), and of the legal department (from Governor Mugur Isarescu), which only entail data processing. The departments that require specific knowledge, such as market operations and financial stability were reassigned to other people, so as to avoid exposing Olteanu to too many technical details.

At the same time, the NBR set up a legislative harmonisation committee, supervised by Olteanu. The committee’s job will be to revise the regulations issued by the NBR so far, but it will also have to prepare the legal details in view of euro adoption in early 2015.

Financial stability, another major department supervised by Dijmarescu in the past was taken over by deputy governor Cristian Popa, who also kept the monetary policy and international relations departments, which he got from the previous terms.

First deputy governor Florin Georgescu, now at his second term, kept his portfolio, supervising some of the most important departments of the NBR – Supervision, Regulation and Licensing, Accounting, Issue and Treasury, as well as the Financial Crisis Management unit.

The assignment of the supervision of the various departments was decided by the Board of Governors in its meeting at the beginning of November, when the monetary policy was debated, as well. The NBR has not made its new organisational chart public yet, because the HR is still working on it, fine tuning the technical details.

Isarescu, now at his fourth term as governor, is specialised in exchange rate policies, having written a doctoral paper on the subject in 1989. Last autumn, during the attack of the foreign speculators against the RON, Isarescu personally oversaw NBR’s exchange rate interventions.