Belgium's Jean-Pol Poncelet, Yukiya Amano of Japan, Ernest Petric of Slovenia, Abdul Samad Minty of South Africa and Luis Echavarri of Spain each gave a short presentation to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

A formal vote on who will suceed Mohamed ElBaradei as IAEA director general will likely at the end of June or the start of July, board chairwoman Taous Feroukhi said.

Tuesday's informal meeting was simply "an opportunity for the five candidates to address the entire membership," she said.

"It will help the member states have an objective assessment of the five candidates. This is the main purpose."

In the run-up to the vote, support for individual candidates is to be gauged via a non-binding straw poll on June 9.

Until then, the candidates will campaign for support from IAEA member states in their respective bid to take over from ElBaradei, who is stepping down in November after three terms, or 12 years, in the postion.

The winning candidate will assume the highly sensitive nuclear dossiers of Syria, Iran and North Korea. He will also have to persuade member countries to contribute more money to its budget.

In an interview, Poncelet, a former Belgian deputy prime minister, defence and energy minister, and current senior vice president of French nuclear group Areva, said his experience as both politician and businessman made him an ideal consensus candidate to bridge North-South divisions on the IAEA board.

Belgium was "a very small country with bilateral relations with everybody, with a culture of consensus and dialogue" and its candidate had "a joint background of technicalities and political and international relations," Poncelet told AFP.

"The Belgian government thought that by doing this, they were offering something to get out of this deadlock," he said.

Poncelet saw no problem from the fact that there were three EU candidates competing for the same job.

Rather, he saw it as positive that three Europeans have been put forward, because it shows that three different EU member states felt they had "something to offer to get out of the deadlock," he said.

South African candidate Minty, 69, and Japanese ambassador Amano, 62, ran in a two-man race for the leadership earlier this year. But neither could secure the necessary two-thirds majority.

Amano had been perceived to be the preferred candidate of the West and Minty the favourite of developing nations. With neither able to bridge the gap, the the race was re-opened.

"Everyone is strong. Everyone is a serious candidate," Amano said.

"All of us have different background and different experience. This is a very transparent and competitive process. I think this is good for strengthening agency," he told journalists.

But he added: "We have to decide this appointment issue as early as possible. Prolonging this issue would not be good for the stability of the agency."

During his term in office, ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his work at the IAEA, has often been criticized as being too outspoken and accused of politicizing the agency.

All five candidates said they would seek to depoliticize the IAEA.

"The agency has to be independent and objective, this is fundamental," said Spanish candidate Echavarri, who currently heads the OECD's Nuclear Energy Agency.

Nevertheless, the IAEA's work had "political implications. and I think as a director general you have to be very well aware of the political consequences of what you do," Echavarri said.

Slovenian candidate Petric, a former IAEA ambassador, agreed, pointing to the case of Iran which is defying UN demands to halt uranium enrichment work and which denies Western suspicions that it is developing nuclear weapons.

Nevertheless, the situation could soon change there, Petric said.

"I hope personally that with the change of administration in the United States and now also with some positive signals coming from Iran -- which might be even more intense after the election there -- that we are coming into a situation where we can come to a good conclusion of this difficult problem," he said.

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