Willem F. Duisenberg, the blunt-spoken Dutch central banker who oversaw the introduction of the euro as the first president of the European Central Bank (ECB), was found dead on Sunday in a swimming pool at his villa in the south of France, the French government said. He was 70. An autopsy showed that Duisenberg drowned after unspecified heart trouble. He ‘‘died a natural death, due to drowning, after a cardiac problem,’’ said Jean-François Sanpieri, a state official near the village of Faucon, where Duisenberg had his villa. A tall, snowy-haired man with a dry wit and a gravelly voice, Duisenberg became the human face of a new currency after he presided over an epic money transfer on January 1, 2002, when 305 million Europeans turned in their francs, marks, lira and other currencies for euros.As president of the ECB in Frankfurt, Duisenberg steered the euro through its first unsteady years — a time when it plummetted to record low levels against the dollar. He also fended off calls for ECB to lower interest rates during the recession of 2001, which gave the fledgling institution credibility at a crucial stage in its development. ‘‘I hear, but I don’t listen,’’ Duisenberg once said of the pleas of public officials to cut rates. — NYT
