Tharman Shanmugaratnam

Career

Tharman was a career civil servant who spent most of his career at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). He served briefly in the Ministry of Education as a Senior Deputy Secretary, before returning to the MAS where he rose to become its Managing Director. He resigned from this position to contest in the 2001 general election.

Political career

Tharman was elected to Parliament at the 2001 general election. Following the election, he was a Senior Minister of State at the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Education. He then served as the Minister for Education from 2003 to 2008. In May 2006, he was also appointed to the post of Second Minister for Finance.

In December 2007, Tharman was appointed as Minister for Finance. He continued to concurrently hold the post of Minister for Education until March 2008.

In June 2008, Tharman was admitted to the Group of Thirty (also known as the 'Consultative Group on International Economic and Monetary Affairs'). This international body is made up of 30 leading financiers and academics, with Paul Volcker as the Chairman of its Board of Trustees.

In March 2011, Tharman was appointed by his international peers as the Chairman of the policy steering committee of the IMF, the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC). He was the first Asian to head the IMFC, coming after Youssef Boutros Ghali, Egypt's former Minister of Finance, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, who had been Italy's Economy and Finance Minister, and Gordon Brown, the United Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer, who chaired the committee for eight years until he became Prime Minister. In announcing Tharman's selection, the IMF said that his "broad experience, deep knowledge of economic and financial issues, and active engagement with global policy makers will be highly valuable to the IMFC".

Tharman succeeded Jean-Claude Trichet as Chairman of the Group of Thirty, an independent global council of leading economic and financial policy-makers from January 1, 2017. He has been a member of the Group since 2008.

Besides his responsibilities in Government, he chairs the Ong Teng Cheong Labour Leadership Institute. He also chairs the Board of Trustees of the Singapore Indian Development Association (SINDA), which seeks to uplift educational performance and aspirations in the Indian Singapore community.

At the 2011 general election, Tharman's team in Jurong Group Representation Constituency (Jurong GRC) won 66.96% of votes against the team from the National Solidarity Party.

Following the 2011 election, Tharman was appointed as one of two Deputy Prime Ministers of Singapore. He was also appointed as the Minister for Manpower from May 2011 to July 2012, in addition to his role as the Minister for Finance.

After the 2015 general election, Tharman was appointed as the Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies. He remains Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Tharman covered Heng Swee Keat's duties at the Finance Ministry after Heng had a stroke during a Cabinet meeting, on 12 May 2016. Tharman relinquished his appointment as the Covering Minister for Finance after Heng Swee Keat resumed his duties on 22 August 2016.

Legal charge and conviction

In 1993, while holding the position of Director of the Economics Department at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Tharman faced charges under the Official Secrets Act (OSA). The case related to the disclosure of Singapore's 1992 second-quarter flash projections to Raymond Foo, a research director, and Manu Bhaskaran, an economist at Crosby Securities, as well as to Kenneth James, a journalist, and Patrick Daniel, the editor of the Business Times.

The OSA case, which stretched over more than a year, was reported extensively in the Singapore press. Tharman contested and was eventually acquitted of the charge of communicating the GDP growth flash projections. Senior District Judge Richard Magnus then introduced a lesser charge of negligence, because the prosecution's case was that the figures were seen on a document that he had with him at a meeting with the private economists which he had attended with one of his colleagues. Tharman contested this lesser charge too, and took to the witness stand for a few days.

The court nevertheless convicted him together with all the others in the case, including the editor of Business Times newspaper which published the figures. Tharman was fined S$1,500, and the others S$2,000. As there was no finding that he knowingly communicated any classified information, the case did not pose any hurdle to his subsequent appointment as the Managing Director of the MAS, or to his subsequent higher national responsibilities.

Education

Tharman attended Anglo-Chinese School, where his contemporaries included former Attorney-General Steven Chong and his successor and incumbent V. K. Rajah. He went on to London School of Economics (LSE), where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics; LSE subsequently honored him with an Honorary Fellowship in 2011. He subsequently obtained a master's degree in economics from Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University, where he also received a Lucius N. Littauer Fellow award for outstanding performance and potential.

Personal life

Tharman is a Singaporean of Ceylonese Tamil ancestry, and is a Hindu. One of three children, Tharman is the son of Emeritus Professor K. Shanmugaratnam, a renowned histopathologist known as the "father of pathology in Singapore" and also a founding director of the Singapore Cancer Registry and founding member of the Singapore Medical Association.

He is married to Jane Yumiko Ittogi, a lawyer of Chinese-Japanese heritage. She is actively engaged in social enterprise and the non-profit arts sector. The couple have a daughter and three sons.

Since 1995, Tharman has a Chinese translation of his name, Shàng Dámàn (尚达曼), which was given by a leading language specialist.