Paris - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has offered to have the United Nations host an international summit on reforming the global finance system, the online version of the French daily Le Figaro reported Saturday.

In a letter to the French president and current head of the European Union, Ban said that he "firmly" supported Sarkozy's call for an international conference to reform the global finance system and proposed holding it at UN headquarters in New York, no later than early December.

The letter, from which Le Figaro cited excerpts, was made public after a meeting between Sarkozy and Ban in Quebec City, during the summit of French-speaking countries.

It remains unclear who is to participate at the finance summit, which both Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown have said should be a "new Bretton Woods."

In September, Sarkozy said that it was "necessary to rebuild the entire global financial and monetary system from the bottom up, the way it was done at Bretton Woods after World War II."

That call was echoed by Brown at last week's EU summit in Brussels.

In July 1944, an agreement was signed in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, that established new rules for commercial and financial relations among the world's major industrial states.

Sarkozy has said that he would like the G8 group of leading industrial nations, the large developing nations such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa, and representatives from the Arab world to participate at such a summit.

Later Saturday, the French president and European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso will meet with US President George W Bush to get his agreement to take part at the summit. (dpa)