The new man at the helm of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) from today will be Jamaica national William Warren Smith, PhD.
Dr Warren Smith was elected at a special meeting of the CDB Board of Governors held on October 29, 2010, to succeed Dr Compton Bourne, who officially demitted office yesterday, the CDB said in a news release.
Dr Smith, who was nominated by Jamaica, had been acting in the capacity of Vice-President of Operations. Prior to taking up that acting position on August 16, 2010, he served as Director, Finance and Corporate Planning.
The new CDB president was educated at Cornell University in the United States and graduated magna cum laude in 1974 with an AB in Economics (Hon) and went on to read for a MSc in Agricultural Economics and for a PhD in Resource Economics and Public Policy.
Dr Smith, 58, is in his second stint at CDB. He first joined the bank in 1985 and was seconded by the bank in 1987 to set up the corporate planning function at the regional airline, LIAT (1974) Limited. He subsequently served as Chief Executive Officer of LIAT before returning to CDB in 1998. He has also held high-level positions at a number of other institutions in the region. These include Director of the Economics and Planning Division at the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica; acting Director of the Investment Analysis Division of the Jamaica National Investment Company; Chief Executive Officer, Prudential Stock Brokers Ltd; and Vice-President, Investments at Life of Jamaica Limited, which was then the largest life insurance company in the Caribbean. Since 2008, he has been a Director of the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, the release said.
Dr Smith is married to medical practitioner Dr Anne-Marie Irvine.
