Central Bank appoints temporary directors

PHILIPSBURG – The Central Bank of Curacao and St. Maarten temporarily appointed Leila Matroos-Lasten to the function of director secretary and José Jardim to financial economic director on Monday.
The appointments were necessary to prevent that the Central Bank ends up without leadership after ad interim President Alberto Romero retires this Friday, November 17.
The new supervisory board of the Central Bank began immediately after its appointment in August with the recruitment of two directors for the vacant positions within the management board.

Due to the passing of Hurricane Irma on September 6, the supervisory board could only present recommendations on October 2. The bank’s charter stipulates that the supervisory board has to nominate three candidates for each vacancy. The countries – St. Maarten and Curacao – did not manage to appoint the new directors before the deadline of November 17.

This forced the supervisory board to make two temporary appointments.
Leila Matroos-Lasten, 43, is a chartered accountant who held several management positions at respected local companies. Matroos takes over the function of director secretary from Jerry Hasselmeyer who retired earlier this summer.

Security risk management

Matroos’ LinkedIn profile shows that she graduated as a bachelor in business administration and as a chartered accountant at the University of the Netherlands Antilles and started her career in 1996 as accountant at KPMG Accountants B.V. After working for KPMG for 4 years. She worked for 8 years as vice president operational, information and security risk management at the ING Bank N.V. Curacao Branch. After working for ING Bank, Matroos worked for 6 years for telecom provider UTS as Chief Financial Officer and member of the Executive Development Committee. Hereafter she assumed the function of adjunct director at the General Pension Fund in Curacao. In this function Matroos was responsible for the financial, human resource, information technology and internal affairs management of the Fund.

Experience

Having worked for these companies Matroos has gained quite an experience in both the auditing, financial management and risk management areas. On September 1, 2014 Matroos assumed the function of Managing Director at Vidanova Bank N.V. where she was responsible for operational, financial, human resource, information technology and internal affairs management.

Minister of finance

Jose Jardim. Photo Facebook

José Jardim, 44, is an economist, a former sector-director at the finance ministry and also a former minister of finance in Curacao.

Jardim succeeds the bank’s ad interim president Alberto Romero as financial economic director.

Both appointments take effect on November 17.