The Spokesman for the Office of the High Representative (OHR), Kevin Sullivan, told reporters that Ashdown decided to appoint the Bosnian Serb candidate, Sredoje Novic, to this post.
Novic has been appointed as a candidate who had the best performance at a test carried out in accordance with the public announcement of the vacancy, Sullivan said.
Novic was the director of SIPA, a kind of Bosnian FBI, in the previous term, which expired two months ago.
After that, applications were invited for the SIPA director vacancy, but Croat and Serb members of the ministerial council, i.e. Bosnian government, could not agree whether the new director should be a Serb or a Croat.
Bosnian Security Minister Barisa Colak, who is from the Croat ranks, nominated Dragan Lukac, a former SIPA deputy director and former head of the police administration of the Croat-Muslim entity's Interior Ministry
Bosnian Foreign Minister Mladen Ivanic insisted on the appointment of Novic, explaining that at the moment there was no Serb at the helm of any important Bosnian security or police agency.
Facing this conflict in the ministerial council, its chairman, Adnan Terzic, last week called on Ashdown to solve this problem.
Ashdown then appointed Novic, and the OHR stated that it was regrettable that local politicians failed to agree on the matter.