Pedro Pablo Kuczynski

Excelentísimo Señor Pedro Pablo Kuczynski OSP
66th President of Peru
Incumbent
Assumed office 28 July 2016
Prime Minister	Fernando Zavala Lombardi
Vice President	Martín Vizcarra Mercedes Aráoz
Preceded by	Ollanta Humala
Prime Minister of Peru
In office 16 August 2005 – 27 July 2006
President	Alejandro Toledo
Preceded by	Carlos Ferrero
Succeeded by	Jorge del Castillo
Minister of Economy and Finance
In office 16 February 2004 – 16 August 2005
President	Alejandro Toledo
Prime Minister	Carlos Ferrero
Preceded by	Jaime Quijandría
Succeeded by	Fernando Zavala Lombardi
In office 28 July 2001 – 11 July 2002
President	Alejandro Toledo
Prime Minister	Roberto Dañino
Preceded by	Javier Silva Ruete
Succeeded by	Javier Silva Ruete
Minister of Energy and Mines
In office 28 July 1980 – 3 August 1982
President	Fernando Belaúnde Terry
Prime Minister	Manuel Ulloa Elías
Preceded by	René Balarezo
Succeeded by	Fernando Montero
Personal details
Born	Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard (1938-10-03) 3 October 1938 Lima, Peru
Political party	Independent (Before 2014) Peruvians for Change (2014–present)
Other political affiliations	Alliance for the Great Change (2010–2013)
Spouse(s)	Jane Casey (Divorced) Nancy Lange
Children	Carolina Alex John Suzanne
Residence	Government Palace
Alma mater	Exeter College, Oxford Princeton University
Signature
Website	Official website

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard (Spanish: [ˈpeðɾo ˈpaβlo kuˈtʃinski ɣoˈðaɾð] ; born 3 October 1938) better known simply as PPK, is a Peruvian economist, politician, and public administrator who is the current (66th) President of Peru. He previously served as Prime Minister of Peru from 2005 to 2006.

Kuczynski worked in the United States before entering Peruvian politics.^[1] He held positions at both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund before being designated as general manager of Peru's Central Reserve Bank. He later served as Minister of Energy and Mines in the early 1980s under President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, and as Minister of Economy and Finance and Prime Minister under President Alejandro Toledo in the 2000s.^[2]

Kuczynski was a presidential candidate in the 2011 presidential election, placing third. His opponents Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori went on to the June 5, 2011 runoff election, in which Humala was elected.^[3] Kuczynski went on to stand in the 2016 election, where he narrowly defeated Fujimori in the second round.^[4] He was sworn in as President on July 28, 2016.^[5][6]

Early life and career

Kuczynski was born at the Clínica Delgado in Lima, Peru, the son of Madeleine (Godard) and Maxime Hans Kuczynski, one of the earliest public health leaders in Peru.^[7][8][9] His parents fled Germany in 1933 to escape from Nazism; his father, born in Poznań, was a German Jew whose family was from Poland, and his mother was Christian, of Swiss-French descent. Entering Peru in 1936, he received his early education at Markham College in Lima, Peru, and Rossall School in Lancashire, England where he was a pupil in Maltese Cross House between 1953 and 1956. He won a foundation scholarship to study at Exeter College, Oxford, and graduated with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics in 1960. Later, he received the John Parker Compton fellowship to study public affairs at Princeton University in the United States, where he received a master's degree in 1961. He began his career at the World Bank in 1961 as a regional economist for six countries in Central America, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.^[10]

In 1967, Kuczynski returned to Peru to work at the country's central bank during the government of President Fernando Belaunde Terry. Kuczynski went into exile in the United States in 1969 due to political persecution after Belaunde Terry's government fell to the military dictatorship of General Juan Velasco Alvarado in a coup d'etat. Kuczynski then joined the World Bank as the chief economist managing the northern countries of Latin America, moving on to become Chief of Policy Planning. From 1973 to 1975, he was a partner of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., the international investment bank headquartered in New York City. In 1975, he returned to Washington, D.C to become chief economist for the International Finance Corporation (the private finance arm of the World Bank). Subsequently, he was appointed President of Halco Mining in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an international consortium mining company with operations in West Africa.

From 1983 to 1992, he was co-chairman of First Boston in New York City, an international investment bank. In 1992, he founded, with six other partners, the Latin American Enterprise Fund (LAEF) in Miami, Florida, a private equity firm that focused on investments in Mexico, Central and South America. The institutional investors in LAEF included more than 15 of the world's largest university endowments, foundations, and pension funds. in 1983, he was a founding member of the Inter-American Dialogue and remained a member until 1997.^[11]

Kuczynski has been a director of various companies in Peru and elsewhere. Registered in the state of Florida, he co-owns personal savings vehicle Westfield Capital LLC and is an officer of office-rental partnership South Bayshore Properties.

Political career

In 1980, after the election of Fernando Belaúnde Terry as president, Kuczynski was invited to return to Peru to serve as Minister of Energy and Mines. In this position, he sponsored law 23231 which, through tax exemptions and other incentives, promoted oil and gas exploration and exploitation after a period of relative neglect. Kuczynski resigned in 1982 in order to return to the private sector in the United States. However, during the second round of the 2016 presidential campaign, he claimed that he had to leave due to the threats and attacks from the Shining Path insurgent group: "Let's remember that the terrorists not only hung my effigy on the zanjón (a local denomination for Paseo de La República (es) avenue in Lima) and in San Martín square, but they attacked my apartment. Just as 3 million Peruvians, I left the country". This was in response to an attack by election opponent Keiko Fujimori (daughter of imprisoned strongman Alberto Fujimori and main rival of PPK in the second round of elections) who claimed that Kuczynski didn't "have moral authority to speak of terrorism".^[12]

During the rest of the 1980s and 1990s, Kuczynski was mainly involved in the private-equity fund-management business in the United States. He made small personal donations to the presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush and of George W. Bush and to the state-senator campaign of his wife's cousin in Wisconsin.^[13]

In 2000, Kuczynski joined the presidential campaign of Alejandro Toledo Manrique, then an economics professor at the ESAN university in Lima. After Toledo was elected president in 2001, Kuczynski served as Minister of Economy and Finance from July 2001 to July 2002,^[14] and again from February 2004 to August 2005. In August 2005, he was appointed as Prime Minister, a position he held until Toledo's presidential term expired in 2006.

In 2007, Manuel Dammert Ego Aguirre, a sociologist and politician, alleged that while he held public office Kuczynski was involved in facilitating the activities, in various projects in Peru, of a financial entity known as First Capital Partners, in particular in relation to the Olmos diversion project, the Jorge Chávez International Airport, the Transportadora de Gas, and the Conrisa consortium. It is true that for a few days former partners of Kuczynski in LAEF (above) had ¨inappropriately and incorrectly¨ listed Kuczynski as a founding partner of First Capital. However this ¨error¨ was corrected within days, and as a consequence Kuczynski sued Dammert for defamation and falsification of documents. Kuczynski prevailed at the first and second instance, but on appeal Peru's Supreme Court upheld Dammert's right to ask on matters of public interest, without ruling on the merits of Dammert's claims. These claims have been denied extensively by Kuczynski.^[15][16]

After working with the Toledo administration, he founded Agua Limpia, a Peruvian non-governmental organization that provides drinking water systems to communities in Peru. Agua Limpia is supported by the Inter-American Development Bank, Scotia Bank of Canada and others.^[17]

2011 presidential campaign

On December 1, 2010, Kuczynski announced that he would stand as a candidate for President of Peru in the upcoming elections.^[18] Kuczynski ran for President of Peru in the general election, though he did not pass into the run-off as head of the Alianza por el Gran Cambio (Alliance for the Great Change), formed by the Christian People's Party, the Alliance for Progress, the Humanist Party and the National Restoration Party.^[10]

2016 presidential campaign

In 2015, he announced that he would again be running for President, but now with a political party which he had built himself (Peruanos Por el Cambio).^[10]

Kuczynski won 21% of the popular vote in Peru's general elections on April 10 to qualify for a runoff vote against Keiko Fujimori,^[19] in which he narrowly triumphed with 50.12% of the vote to Fujimori's 49.88%.^[4]

Presidency

Kuczynski was sworn in as President on July 28, 2016.^[5][6] At 77, he was the oldest President to take office.^[20]

Family and personal life

His father, Maxime Hans Kuczyński was born in Poznań, then part of German Empire. He was a bacteriologist who served in the German army during World War I on the Balkan front. He was a renowned pathologist and tropical disease specialist, in particular expert on Verruga peruana or Carrion's disease. He trained at the Universities of Rostock and Berlin, where he was professor of pathology. An officer in the German army on the Eastern and Turkish fronts in the First World War, he travelled widely in Russia, China, West Africa, and Brazil. Leaving Germany in 1933 because of his Jewish roots, he was invited to Peru in 1936 by President Óscar R. Benavides to set up the public health service in the interior of the country. Maxime Hans Kuczynski reformed the San Pablo leprosarium on the Amazon at the Brazilian frontier, set up a public health colony on the Perene river, and was later professor of tropical medicine at National University of San Marcos in Lima.^[21]

He is the first cousin of film director Jean-Luc Godard. The relationship is from his mother, Madeleine Godard, who was the aunt of the film director.^[22]

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard has been married twice, first to Jane Dudley Casey (daughter of Joseph E. Casey, member of the U.S. House for the 3rd district of Massachusetts), their children being businesswoman Carolina Madeleine Kuczynski, the journalist Alex Kuczynski,^[14] and John-Michael Kuczynski. His current wife is Nancy Lange, with whom he has a daughter. Contrary to false information spread during Mr. Kuczynski's second presidential race, Nancy Lange is not a cousin of the actress Jessica Lange: they are only very distantly related and do not know each other. Kuczynski's younger brother Miguel Jorge is a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge; and their first cousin is Jean-Luc Godard, the renowned French-Swiss film director. Kuczynski's brother-in-law Harold Varmus received the Nobel Prize for cancer research in 1989.

Ancestry

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.

• Official website (in Spanish)
• Pedro Pablo Kuczynski profile - El Mundo newspaper (in Spanish)
• PPK on Twitter
• Newsweek interview with Kuczynski
• Biography by CIDOB (in Spanish)

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