BUENOS AIRES: Argentine President Mauricio Macri sacked his finance minister Alfonso Prat-Gay on Monday, shaking up his economic team amid a stubborn recession that has made his center-right reforms deeply unpopular.
Prat-Gay’s ministry will be split in two, said chief of staff Marcos Pena.
Nicolas Dujovne, a respected economist, will take over as finance minister. Luis Caputo, who previously served Prat-Gay as budget secretary, will take over the newly created budget ministry.
The president himself requested Prat-Gay’s resignation, Pena said. “It’s a matter of policy differences,” he told a press conference.
It is Macri’s first cabinet reshuffle since he swept to power just over a year ago, putting an emphatic end to 12 years of left-wing rule.
Prat-Gay had been instrumental in a flurry of market-oriented reforms, including the end of foreign exchange controls — which caused the peso to lose one-third of its value and sent annual inflation soaring above 40 percent.
