MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s next finance minister, Carlos Urzua, told Reuters on Monday that Victoria Rodriguez will serve as deputy finance minister for expenditures in place of Gerardo Esquivel, who has been nominated to serve on the board of the central bank.
Rodriguez most recently served as a finance and budget official with Mexico City’s local government, in addition to a previous post heading up finances for the capital’s subway system.
She worked for Urzua over a dozen years ago when he was the capital city’s finance minister under then-Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who won a landslide presidential election in July and is set to be sworn in on December 1.
Rodriguez had been tapped to serve as director of the finance ministry’s budget control unit, a less senior post in the incoming government, but moved up after Esquivel was picked to serve on the central bank’s board.
Lopez Obrador, who will be Mexico’s first leftist president in decades, has pledged to put an end to corruption in Latin America’s second-biggest economy while also alleviating widespread poverty.
His finance team has sought to calm nervous markets after Lopez Obrador pulled the plug on a partially-built Mexico City airport and one of his party’s congressional leaders proposed lowering bank commissions, decisions that put pressure on the peso currency and the country’s benchmark stock market.
Earlier on Monday, Urzua said he will push for a larger primary budget surplus next year as he sought to shore up investor confidence after the main stock index fell to its lowest level since 2014.
(Reporting by Stefanie Eschenbacher; Editing by Leslie Adler and Darren Schuettler)
