ANKARA, Feb. 3 (Xinhua) -- Fatih Karahan, deputy governor of Türkiye's central bank, was appointed as the bank's new governor on Saturday, according to the Official Gazette.
Karahan started his career as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He became a senior economist at Amazon in 2022 and was later appointed as the principal economist of the company. Karahan became the deputy chief of the central bank in July 2023.
The appointment came a few hours after the central bank's governor Hafize Gaye Erkan announced her resignation on Friday, following allegations of nepotism.
In a statement on social media platform X, Erkan said the nepotism accusations against her were "character assassination."
Recent media reports claimed that Erkan allowed her family, particularly her father, to be involved in the decision-making process of the central bank, and authorized wasteful spending from the bank's budget.
In a separate announcement, Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek said that the economic program of the country will carry on uninterrupted and that Erkan's resignation was her personal decision.
After Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won re-election in May 2023, the government began to reverse the low-interest rate policy that left many Turks struggling to afford food and other basic goods and turned to an aggressive tightening policy.
Erkan, the first woman to run the bank, was appointed by Erdogan in June.
She introduced a sharp tightening cycle since then.
The central bank's interest rate has since then been raised from 8.5 percent to the current 45 percent.
