The central bank governors from six Gulf Arab nations ended their sixth meeting in Riyadh late Wednesday with an agreement to pursue plans to set up an executive body ahead of the creation of the region’s first central bank.

In a statement published in Saudi newspapers on Thursday, the officials from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain-members of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-said they had already approved the budget of the GCC Monetary Council (GMC) and would hold more talks through 2011 to establish an executive body that will carry out the GMC’s functions.

“The executive body is to be drawn from the four members and will be headed by a CEO, who will pick the administrative staff and devise plans of action,” the Saudi Arabic language daily Aleqtisadiah said.

“The GMC will assume a supervisory role while the executive body will chalk out plans and implement GMC’s decisions.”

The paper said the GMC should hold at least six meetings every year pending the creation of a GCC central bank, which will in turn launch a single currency.

In press comments on Wednesday, GCC secretary general Abdul Rahman Al Ateyya urged the other GCC members to rejoin the currency union to ensure full economic merger within the 29-year-old Gulf alliance.

The UAE, the largest Arab economy after Saudi Arabia, quit the monetary union in early 2009 to protest the choice of Riyadh as the headquarters of the planned central bank. Oman quit two years earlier on the grounds it was not ready yet.