Pedro Pablo Kuczynski

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. 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.

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.

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".

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.

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, 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.

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.

2011 presidential campaign

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

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).

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

Presidency

Kuczynski was sworn in as President on July 28, 2016. At 77, he was the oldest President to take office. As part of the recent push in Peru to recognize and integrate indigenous into national life, Kuczynski's government is supporting the use of indigenous languages in Peru, with the state-run TV station starting to broadcast in December 2016 a daily news program in Quechua and in April 2017 one in Aymara. The President's state-of-the-union address was simultaneously translated to Quechua in July 2017.

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.

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.

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, 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.

Despite his Polish heritage, Kuczynski is only fluent in Spanish, English, German and French.