Steve Forbes, the publisher and former US presidential hopeful, blamed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) yesterday for doing more harm than good to developing countries and said China should ignore pressure to revalue its currency.

"They're like a doctor that kills patients. You won't want to go to the IMF," Mr Forbes said on the sidelines of a seminar hosted by his financial media group in Shanghai.

Mr Forbes said the International Monetary Fund was doing too little to help poorer countries, whose disagreement with richer nations helped lead to the collapse of World Trade Organisation talks in Mexico on Sunday.

"The IMF always tells countries to devalue their currency. All that does is, it leads to inflation, flight of capital and higher cost of capital," he said.

China, for one, should be left to run its own currency, he told Reuters at the Forbes Global CEO conference, adding that debt-laden banks and endemic corruption could derail the country's economic miracle. It should keep its currency regime intact despite pressure from the United States and Japan, who say the yuan is being kept unrealistically cheap, giving Chinese goods an unfair trade advantage overseas.

"The focus on the exchange rate is, to be blunt, a waste of time," said Mr Forbes, who ran twice for the Republican presidential nomination and has attacked US President George W. Bush over taxes in a TV advertisment.

Bush said earlier this month that China's currency peg of about 8.3 to the dollar was unfair, and the issue could come up at this week's meeting of the Group of Seven wealthy nations in Dubai.

"First the change (in yuan) is not going to be great enough to have very much of an impact," Mr Forbes said.