Returning National Treasurer Rosalia De Leon said the government will look for innovative solutions to fund the administration’s ambitious infrastructure program amid external volatilities that may affect the Philippine bond market.
“The scenario right now is different, before we have QE [quantitative easing] but right now, we have the concerns on the policies of the new administration in the US, we have geopolitical concerns—what’s happening in Europe. I think there are more headwinds that we have to encounter,” de Leon said.
“We’ll be having prudent funding exercises and at the same time we continue to strengthen the buffer of the Treasury,” she said, citing the huge funding by infrastructure and social development projects.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III last week swore into office former national treasurer Roberto Tan as the new president of Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp., making way for the appointment of de Leon as the new treasury chief.
Tan, who was national treasurer since 2015, also served in the same Bureau of Treasury post from 2008 to 2012 before assuming the position of executive director at the World Bank in Washington D.C. He started with the Finance Department’s International Finance Group in 1991, and was later named assistant secretary in 1999. He was appointed undersecretary in 2005 before being named National Treasurer in 2008.
Before taking her oath of office as the new National Treasurer,
De Leon13, meanwhile, was the alternate executive director for the same World Bank group previously led by Tan. She previously held the post of National Treasurer from 2013 to 2015.
She was also formerly the chief of staff to the Secretary of Finance from July 2005 to June 2010, and was advisor to the executive director of the Asian Development Bank group comprising the constituency of the Philippines, Pakistan, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
