Close friend of Aung San Suu Kyi in line to be Myanmar president

Aung San Suu Kyi will not become president of Myanmar but instead her NLD party has named a close friend, Htin Kyaw, as its favoured candidate.

The Nobel laureate unofficially made it clear she would run the country regardless from behind the scenes.

Adored in Myanmar, formerly Burma, as “The Lady”, Ms Suu Kyi oversaw a landslide victory in November’s elections with her National League for Democracy party, but she is forbidden from holding the presidency under constitutional rules drafted by the ruling military junta because her late husband and two sons are British.

Htin Kyaw, a 69-year-old economics graduate and political neophyte, is a close friend of Ms Suu Kyi and formerly her driver.

He runs a charity called the Daw Khin Kyi Foundation, which was founded in honour of Ms Suu Kyi's mother.

The military still has considerable power in Myanmar, controlling a quarter of all seats in parliament and retaining control of key ministries.

The government is due to take power on April 1st and it will be the first democratically elected government since the army seized power in 1962.

Ms Suu Kyi, who spent 15 years under house arrest in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), vowed to rule “above” the president, but there had been feint hopes that perhaps she would find a compromise with the military to allow her to rule.

The negotiations over the presidency left the country to wait four months to find out whom she and the NLD would name to rule in her name.

The appointment of the president is a complex affair and could take several days.

Three candidates will be put to a vote of the combined houses - one each from the upper house, lower house and from the military’s parliamentary bloc, which represents a quarter of the legislature.

Two of these appointees will be backed by the NLD, and one will be a military candidate.

The two losing candidates will become vice-presidents. It is not clear when the votes will take place.

One of the first tasks of the new government will be ending numerous conflicts between the central government and various armed ethnic groups in Myanmar.

From the upper house, the NLD has nominated Henry Vantriu, a member of the Chin ethnic group from Chin state in the country's northwest bordering India and Bangladesh, as its candidate from the upper house.

A final vote of the combined houses, in which the NLD has a massive majority, will then determine which will become the president, leaving the other two as vice presidents.

Additional reporting: agencies