International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde launched her campaign for a second term yesterday with ringing endorsements from a host of major economies – and a court case against her looming in her native France.
The former French finance minister who trained as a lawyer has no obvious challengers and has long been open to serving another five-year term. The prime ministers of Britain and France backed her publicly on Thursday.
“I am candidate to a new mandate. I was honoured to receive from the start of the process the backing of France, Britain, Germany, China, Korea,” the 60-year-old told France 2 television in an interview from Davos.
Germany’s Finance Ministry weighed in with its own endorsement yesterday.
“Germany welcomes the renewed candidacy of Christine Lagarde for a further term as managing director of the IMF. Ms Lagarde was a prudent and successful crisis manager in the difficult times after the financial crisis,” the finance ministry said in a statement.
The first woman to head the fund on her appointment in 2011, Lagarde has been dogged off-and-on since then for her role in a long-running business scandal while she was France’s finance minister.
Last month, a French judge ordered her to face trial for negligence in a special ministerial court over the 2008 payout of some €400 million to businessman Bernard Tapie.
Tapie himself was ordered last year to repay the money, which he received as state compensation for a business transaction in which he later claimed he had been defrauded.
Lagarde has said she will appeal that decision.
“I feel that I always acted in the state’s interest and within the law. I have my conscience for me in this affair. I hope the courts ... will agree with that,” she told France 2 yesterday.
A synchronised swimmer in her youth, Lagarde once said in an interview it was that sport which taught her the maxim “grit your teeth and smile” in the man’s world she moves in and where her designer clothes stand out in a sea of dark suits.
She joined the international law firm Baker & McKenzie in Paris aged 25 after completing a master’s degree in English and labour law, and quickly rose to the top of the Chicago-based firm before entering politics.
As finance minister under former President Nicolas Sarkozy, she attracted criticism early in her tenure by suggesting that the French had become work-shy and that navel-gazing hindered reform.
Born in Paris and raised in the northern port city of Le Havre, Lagarde is a vocal proponent of women as senior executives, once noting drily that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, it might have survived.