The former PepsiCo CEO has the backing of the Trump family to succeed Yong Kim.
The White House is reportedly considering Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, to be the next president of the World Bank, The New York Times reported on Tuesday, after the exit of Jim Yong Kim.
Yong Kim resigned as president of the World Bank, shocking the business world and causing uncertainty across the international business and aid community.
Nooyi, on the other hand, who stepped down from Pepsi in August after twelve years as CEO, has been “courted as an administration ally by Ivanka Trump,” The Times reported.
Trump is working with treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to select the new president of the World Bank.
Ivanka Trump described Nooyi as a “mentor” and “inspiration” when Nooyi stepped down from Pepsi.
Not an official announcement yet
It is not yet clear whether Nooyi would accept the nomination, however.
After Donald Trump was elected president, Nooyi said that the news had terrified both her employees and her family.
“I had to answer a lot of questions from my daughters,” she told Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times’ DealBook conference in November 2016. “Our employees were all crying. And the question that they’re asking, especially those who are not white, ‘Are we safe?’ Women are asking, ‘Are we safe?’ LGBT people are asking, ‘Are we safe?'”
A PepsiCo spokesperson later told Fortune magazine that Nooyi misspoke.
The DC-based World Bank, founded after World War II to finance economic-development projects in emerging economies, has traditionally been led by an American. However, this is not a given.
The Trump administration, which has been suspicious of and even hostile toward Western-led international institutions, will now be tasked with submitting a recommendation to the bank’s board.
