Professor Gordon Shirley, who heads the business school at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies, is tipped to take over as Jamaica’s ambassador to the United States, political and diplomatic sources in Kingston and Washington said yesterday.

The Jamaican foreign ministry has not yet announced Shirley’s selection, but according to one well-placed Observer source he is likely to head for Washington within a few months to replace former deputy prime minister, Seymour Mullings, who last month confirmed he will be coming home early.

“Once there are no hitches Professor Shirley will be able to present his agrement at the State Department by the end of April,” a Jamaican government source said yesterday.

Shirley himself could not be contacted for comment.

Mullings, a respected and well-liked long-serving parliamentarian who held ministerial posts in the People’s National Party (PNP) governments of the 1970s and the 1990s, left the Cabinet in 2002 having been surprisingly chosen by Prime Minister P J Patterson to replace Dr Richard Bernal as Jamaica’s man in Washington. Among Mullings’ government jobs, though, was minister of foreign affairs.

Bernal, who now heads the Caribbean Community’s umbrella trade negotiating group, the Regional Negotiating Machinery (RNM), was ambassador in Washington for 14 years.

It was initially suggested that Mullings was returning home because of ill health, but he rejected that, telling the Observer that he would be completing his assignment at home. He declined, however, to say exactly what he would do.

It is expected that Shirley, who has degrees in economics and business, will return Jamaica’s approach in Washington to the technocratic bent that characterised Bernal’s tenure when he focused heavily on economic and trade issues, such as negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Although Shirley’s career has largely been in academia, he did have a stint as executive chairman of the light and power supplier, Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCo) from the late 1990s until the firm was privatised in 2002, when he attempted to impose private sector disciplines on the operation.

At the Mona School of Business he has attempted to modernise the structure, bringing it into greater interface with the private sector, some of whose former leaders are new lecturers and research fellows at the institution.