U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the World Bank Group should be led by U.S. Treasury official David Malpass, a Trump loyalist and critic of multilateral institutions who has vowed to pursue "pro-growth" reforms at the development lender.
Trump's nomination of Malpass, the Treasury Department's top diplomat, is subject to a vote by the World Bank's executive board and could draw challengers from some of its 188 other shareholding countries.
The United States is the largest shareholder, with 16 percent of its voting power, and has traditionally chosen the bank's president, but Jim Yong Kim, who stepped down from the job on Feb. 1, faced challengers from Colombia and Nigeria in 2012.