The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has kicked off its search for a new president to replace Robert Kaplan, the bank’s previous top executive who left last month after a scandal erupted over his personal financial transactions. ADVERTISEMENT The bank’s search is being led by its non-bank directors, it said in a statement on Wednesday, who have hired the executive search firm Egon Zehnder to assist them in recruiting potential candidates. Kaplan and former Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren drew criticism in September after revelations that they had made extensive personal trades in 2020 during the height of the pandemic crisis and the Fed’s efforts to stabilize markets and rescue the economy. Both said their trades were in line with the Fed’s ethics guidelines at the time, agreed to divest their stock holdings and ultimately leave their posts. Kaplan retired Oct. 8. Since their departures, the Fed has rewritten its rules to bar the kind of individual-stock trading that Kaplan undertook and to limit the types of holdings and transactions policymakers are allowed to make. The scandal has proven to be headache for Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who is under consideration for renomination for a second four-year term. (Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by Dan Burns and Chizu Nomiyama)