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Days after withdrawing from consideration to be the next director of the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the UK’s Peter Sands has asked to be reinstated. The actions come as the Fund’s Board gathers this week to choose among the final candidates for head of the international health funding organisation based in Geneva.

“Peter Sands asked the Global Fund Board on 13 November to reinstate his candidacy for Executive Director, saying that after withdrawing on 10 November that he had further reflected and wished to rejoin the process,” Global Fund spokesperson Seth Faison told Intellectual Property Watch and Global Health Policy News today. Sands had cited personal reasons for withdrawing, he said.

The Board is scheduled to select an Executive Director during a Board meeting on 14-15 November, he noted. The list of Global Fund Board members is available here.

The four candidates for the director post, as previously reported by IP-Watch (IPW, Global Health Policy News, 23 October 2017), are:

Simon Bland (UK) is the Director of the New York Office of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. He served as the Chair of the Global Fund Board from 2011 to 2013. Formerly, he worked for three decades at the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom, and led its operations in Kenya.

Frannie Leautier (Tanzania) is the former Senior Vice President of the African Development Bank where she was a key member of President Adesina’s transition team. Previously, she was Chief Executive Officer of the African Capacity Building Foundation, after a successful career at the World Bank, during which she spent time as Chief of Staff to President Wolfensohn, and ran the World Bank Institute, the institution’s capacity building branch.

Peter Sands (UK) is the former Group Chief Executive of Standard Chartered Bank. He began his career at McKinsey & Company. After having spent a sustained period leading a major bank with global operations in relevant countries, he has held a fellowship at Harvard, and immersed himself in a range of global public health projects.

Anil Soni (US) is a senior executive at Mylan Inc., the global pharmaceutical corporation, co-leading development, sales, and partnerships for medicines to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and hepatitis C via a generic subsidiary. He was closely involved in the early years of the Global Fund as an adviser to Richard Feachem, after which he led the advocacy work of Friends of the Global Fight in Washington, DC. He spent five years at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, latterly as its Chief Executive.

According to reports, candidates have been engaging with constituencies in recent weeks and are expected to present and interact with the Board this week.

The position of director opened up in May with the long-planned departure of Mark Dybul. An initial search for his successor was abandoned last winter and restarted (IPW, Health and IP, 28 February 2017), leading to this week’s decision.

A description of the Voting Procedure [pdf], outlined in a Board paper that is on the Global Fund website, is reprinted below:

The Voting Procedure

2.1. Throughout the process, all votes will be done anonymously. All ballots will be collected and counted by the Global Fund’s Legal and Compliance Department, and subsequently held under confidential file.

2.2.Unless a very clear consensus exists following an initial ‘straw poll’ described below, voting will proceed through three rounds of weighted voting, ultimately producing the most preferred candidate. The Board will then formally vote on that candidate.

Straw Poll

2.3.Before the start of the formal voting process, the presence of consensus will be ‘tested’ through an informal process referred to as a ‘straw poll’. The results of the straw poll will be purely for information and non-binding. The straw poll will occur by weighted voting, which asks Board members to allocate points to candidates by order of preference, as follows:

• First preference: 5 points
• Second preference: 3 points
• Third preference: 1 point
• Fourth preference: 0 points

2.4.Board members are encouraged to rank all candidates by order of preference. However, Board members are not required to allocate points to all candidates, and can instead provide points to a subset. For example, a Board member could rank only one candidate in the straw poll, instead of all four. In this example, the Board member’s ballot would provide five points to the selected candidate, and the remaining points (3 and 1) would be unused.

2.5.The points given to each candidate will be added together, and the final tally will be announced by the Board Leadership. The voting ballot for the straw poll will follow the same form as the one enclosed below.

Weighted Voting Cycles

2.6.Unless a very clear consensus for a single candidate exists after the straw poll, the ‘most preferred’ candidate will be identified through multiple weighted voting cycles.

2.7. Board members will be asked to rank candidates by points in the same manner as the straw poll as described above (using substantially the same voting ballot).

2.8.With each cycle, the candidate with the least number of total votes will be removed from consideration. Ultimately, the weighted voting cycles will result in a single ‘most-preferred’ candidate.

Final Affirmative Vote

2.9.Following identification of the most-preferred candidate, he/she receives an up-or-down vote by the Board (i.e., Yes/No). Consistent with the Bylaws, in order for the vote to pass, there must be an affirmative two-thirds majority vote of each of the donor and implementer blocs.

With such affirmative vote, the candidate will be selected as the next Executive Director of the Global Fund.