Pedro Pablo Kuczynski

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski
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
Prime Minister	Carlos Ferrero
Preceded by	Jaime Quijandría
Succeeded by	Fernando Zavala
In office 28 July 2001 – 11 July 2002
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
Prime Minister	Manuel Ulloa Elías
Preceded by	René Balarezo
Succeeded by	Fernando Montero
Personal details
Born	Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard 3 October 1938 Lima, Peru
Political party	Independent (Before 2014) PPK (2014–present)
Other political affiliations	AGC-PPK (2010–2013)
Spouse(s)	Jane Casey (Divorced) Nancy Lange
Children	Carolina Alex John Suzanne
Alma mater	Exeter College, Oxford Princeton University
Religion	Roman Catholicism
Website	Official website

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard (born October 3, 1938), better known simply as PPK, is a Peruvian public administrator, economist politician and 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 Peruvian presidential election, coming in third place. His opponents Ollanta Humala Tasso and Keiko Fujimori went on to the June 5, 2011 runoff election, in which Humala was elected.^[3] Pedro Pablo Kucynski is a candidate for the Presidency in the 2016 race.

Early life and career before politics

Kuczynski was born in Lima, Peru, the son of Madeleine Godard, who was of Swiss-French descent, and Polish-Jewish immigrant Maxime Hans Kuczynski, who was born near Poznań, and was one of the earliest public health leaders in Peru.^[4][5][6] He received his early education at Markham College in Lima, Peru, and Rossall School in Lancashire, England. 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.

In 1967, Kuczynski returned to Peru to become the Deputy General Manager of the Peruvian Central Bank being young but was exiled out of Peru in 1969 with former president Fernando Belaunde Terry due to political persecution from dictatorial General Juan Velasco Alvarado's administration. He then joined the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. as an economist and, in 1971, became Chief Economist for the northern countries of Latin America at the World Bank, moving on to become Chief of Policy Planning at the Bank. From 1973 to 1975, he was a partner of Kuhn Loeb and 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 1983-1992, 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.

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

Political career

In 1980, after the election which named 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. This controversial measure has been subject to repeated change and reinstatement.^[7] Kuczynski also decentralized new investment in electricity generation.

During the 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-senatorship campaign of his wife's cousins in Wisconsin.^[8]

In 2000, Alejandro Toledo Manrique, then professor at the ESAN university in Lima, asked Kuczynski to advise him on his campaign for president. Kuczynski returned to work in Peru, and after Toledo's successful campaign, Kuczynski was appointed as his Minister of Economy and Finance from July 2001 to July 2002,^[9] 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's suit was upheld at the first and second instance, but on appeal to Peru's Supreme Court Dammert's right to ask on matters of public interest was upheld, without ruling on the merits of Dammert's claims, which have been discussed extensively by Kuczynski.^[10][11]

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.^[12]

On December 1, 2010, Kuczynski announced that he would stand as a candidate for President of Peru in the upcoming elections.^[13] 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.

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 Kambio). He actively campaigned for the 2016 election.

Family and personal life

His father, Maxime Hans Kuczynski, born in Poznań, Poland, 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 San Marcos University in Lima.^[14]

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard has been married twice: first to Jane Dudley Casey (daughter of Joseph E. Casey, member of the U.S. congress for the 3rd district of Massachusetts), their offspring being corporate executive and technology entrepreneur, Carolina Madeleine Kuczynski, the journalist Alex Kuczynski,^[9] and John-Michael Kuczynski. His current wife is Nancy Lange with whom he has had a daughter. 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

Ancestors of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski
4. Louis Kuczynski                             2. Maxime Hans Kuczynski                                   5. Emma Schlesinger                             1. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski                                         3. Madeleine Godard

References

1. "Mitos y verdades sobre PPK". Ppk.pe. Retrieved 2011-06-04.
2. "Presidencia del Consejo de Ministros". Pcm.gob.pe. Retrieved 2011-06-04.
3. "Elecciones Presidenciales, Congresales y de Parlamento Andino Peru 2011". Elecciones2011.onpe.gob.pe. Retrieved 2011-06-04.
4. Bartholomew Dean 2004 “El Dr. Maxime Kuczynski-Godard y la medicina social en la Amazonía peruana” Introduction in La Vida en la Amazonía Peruana: Observaciones de un medico. by Maxime Kuczynski-Godard. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Serie Clásicos Sanmarquinos)(Compilation and introductory essay of second edition, originally published in 1944)(digital copy: Ficha biblioteca de San Marcos)
5. http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2016/04/11/america/1460393870_462276.html
6. http://scielo.isciii.es/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0211-95362009000100005
7. Buena acogida a los proyectos de Alan García para reintegrar la deuda peruana, El País, 30 de julio de 1985
8. "Las donaciones a los Bush". Diario16. Retrieved 2011-06-04.
9. "WEDDINGS/CELEBRATIONS; Alex Kuczynski, Charles Stevenson Jr.". New York Times. December 1, 2002. Retrieved 25 April 2010.
10. "First Capital, pieza clave de PPK". LaRepublica.pe. Retrieved 2011-06-04.
12. Agualimpia ONG 2011/
13. "Kuczynski será candidato a la Presidencia y el lunes presentará a sus aliados | El Comercio Perú". Elcomercio.pe. Retrieved 2011-06-04.
14. Bartholomew Dean 2004 “El Dr. Máxime Kuczynski-Godard y la medicina social en la Amazonía peruana” Introduction in La Vida en la Amazonía Peruana: Observaciones de un medico. by Máxime Kuczynski-Godard. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Serie Clásicos Sanmarquinos)(Compilation and introductory essay of second edition, originally published in 1944)(digital copy: Ficha biblioteca de San Marcos)

External links

• (Spanish) Official Website
• (Spanish) Pedro Pablo Kuczynski profile - El Mundo newspaper
• PPK on Twitter
• Newsweek interview with Kuczynski