Former Minister of Finance Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has been appointed into a High Level Group on Governance of the Commonwealth Secretariat.
Prof. Ben Maloney, Communications Officer, Commonwealth Secretariat, said in a statement that the High Level Group would make recommendations on governance of the Commonwealth Secretariat.
The Commonwealth, however, denied that the group was constituted to secretly begin considering who might succeed the Queen as its head.
The group is chaired by Anote Tong, former President of Kiribati from 2003 to 2016.
Okonjo-Iweala is among the seven-member group, which consist of Lord Howell, former British Energy Secretary; Louise Frechette, former UN Deputy Secretary-General; and Robert Hill, former Australian Defence Minister.
Others are Dame Miller, former Deputy Prime Minister of Barbados and Dr George Vella, former Foreign Minister of Malta are also members of the group.
The group operates independently of the London-based Commonwealth Secretariat and would report only to the heads of Commonwealth governments.
The group is expected to report to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London in April, which is likely to be the last that the Queen would attend.