Pedro Pablo Kuczynski

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This name uses Spanish naming customs: the first or paternal family name is Kuczynski and
the second or maternal family name is Godard.

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski

OSP

66th President of Peru

In office
28 July 2016 – 23 March 2018

Prime Minister Fernando Zavala

Mercedes Aráoz

Vice President Martín Vizcarra (1st)

Mercedes Aráoz (2nd)

Preceded by Ollanta Humala

Succeeded by Martín Vizcarra

 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 (age 79)

Lima, Peru

Political party Independent (Before 2014)

Peruvians for Change (2014–present)

Other political Alliance for the Great Change(2010–2013)

affiliations

Spouse(s) Jane Dudley Casey (m. 1962; div. 1995)

Nancy Lange (m. 1997)

Children 4, including Alex

Relatives Maxime Hans Kuczyński(Father)

Alma mater Exeter College, Oxford

Princeton University

Signature
 Website Official website

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard (Spanish: [ˈpeðɾo ˈpaβlo kuˈtʃinski ɣoˈðarð];[a] born 3 October
1938), better known simply as PPK, is a Peruvian economist, politician and public
administrator who served as the 66th President of Peru. He was previously the Prime Minister
of Peru from 2005 to 2006. His administration abruptly ended on 23 March 2018, following his
address to the nation two days earlier, announcing his resignation.[1]
Kuczynski worked in the United States before entering Peruvian politics.[2] He held positions at
both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund before being designated as the
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.[3] Kuczynski was a presidential candidate in the 2011 presidential election, placing third.
His opponents Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimoriwent on to the 5 June 2011 runoff election, in
which Humala was elected.[4] Kuczynski went on to stand in the 2016 election, where he
narrowly defeated Fujimori in the second round.[5] He was sworn in as President on 28 July
2016.[6][7]Kuczynski held U.S. citizenship until November 2015; he renounced it to be able to run
for Peru's Presidency.[8]
On 15 December 2017, the Congress of Peru, which is controlled by the opposition Popular
Force, initiated impeachmentproceedings against Kuczynski, after he was accused of lying
about receiving payments from a scandal-hit Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht in the mid-
2000s.[9] However, on 21 December 2017, the Peruvian congress lacked the majority of votes
needed to impeach Kuczynski.[10] After further scandals and facing a second impeachment
vote, Kuczynski resigned the presidency on 21 March 2018 following the release of videos
showing alleged acts of vote buying, presenting his resignation to the Council of Ministers.[11][12]

Contents
[hide]

 1Early life and career

 2Political career
o 2.12011 presidential campaign
o 2.22016 presidential campaign
 3Presidency
o 3.1Foreign policies
o 3.2Controversies
 3.2.1First impeachment
 3.2.2Pardon of Alberto Fujimori
 3.2.3Second impeachment, Kenjivideos and resignation
 4Family and personal life
o 4.1Ancestry
 5Notes
 6References
 7External links

Early life and career[edit]

Kuczynski was born at the Clínica Delgado in Miraflores, Lima, Peru, the son of Madeleine
(née Godard) and Maxime Hans Kuczynski, one of the earliest public health leaders in
Peru.[13][14][15]
His parents fled Germany in 1933 to escape from Nazism. His father, born in Berlin, German
Empire was a German Jew, and his mother was protestant, of Swiss-French descent. Entering
Peru in 1936, Maxime Kuczynski sent his son to receive his early education at Markham
College in Lima, and the Rossall School (Lancashire, England), where he was a pupil in
Maltese Cross House between 1953-56. 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, Haitiand the Dominican Republic.[16]
In 1967, Kuczynski returned to Peru to work at the country's central bank during the
government of President Fernando Belaúnde. Kuczynski went into exile in the United States in
1969 due to political persecution after Belaunde's government fell to the military dictatorship of
General Juan Velasco Alvarado in a coup d'état: the newly installed government accused
Kuczynski of funnelling about 18 million dollars (equivalent to 115 million in 2016) to Nelson
Rockefeller’s International Petroleum Company (es). He joined the World Bank as the chief
economist managing the northern countries of Latin America, moving on to become Chief of
Policy Planning.[17]
From 1973-75, 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.[17]
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.[18]

Political career[edit]
Kuczynski in 2008

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 left Peru 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 then-imprisoned dictator Alberto Fujimori and main rival of PPK in the second round of
elections) who claimed that Kuczynski did not "have moral authority to speak of terrorism".[19]
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. Bushand to the state-senator
campaign of his wife's cousin in Wisconsin.[20]
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,[21] 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.[citation needed]
In 2007, Manuel Dammert (aka Manuel Dammert Ego Aguirre), a sociologist and politician,
alleged that 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. Former partners of Kuczynski in LAEF (above) had reportedly inaccurately listed
Kuczynski as a founding partner of First Capital but corrected the error shortly afterwards. In
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 questions on matters of public interest, without ruling on the
merits of Dammert's claims. These claims have been denied extensively by Kuczynski.[citation
needed]

After working with the Toledo administration, Kuczynski 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.[22]
2011 presidential campaign[edit]
On 1 December 2010, Kuczynski announced that he would stand as a candidate for President
of Peru in the upcoming elections.[23]
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.[16]
2016 presidential campaign[edit]
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, PPK).[8]
Kuczynski won 21% of the popular vote in Peru's general elections on April 10, 2016, to qualify
for a runoff vote against Keiko Fujimori,[24] in which he narrowly triumphed with 50.12% of the
vote to Fujimori's 49.88%,[5] a margin of just thirty-nine thousand votes out of nearly eighteen
million cast. Barely a week before the second round of voting, when trailing Keiko, Kuczynski
received an important endorsement from third-place finisher Verónika Mendoza (18.82%),
Peru’s leading left-wing candidate, in an effort to defeat Fujimori.[8]
Keiko's party, Fuerza Popular, has an absolute majority in Congress with 73 of the 130 seats;
PPK trails with 18.[8]

Presidency[edit]
Kuczynski and his cabinet, 28 July 2016

Kuczynski was sworn in as President on 28 July 2016.[6][7] At age 77, he was the oldest
President to take office.[25]
As part of the recent push in Peru to recognize and integrate indigenous peoples into national
life, Kuczynski's government supported 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.[26]
Foreign policies[edit]
Kuczynski opposed the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and welcomed the
Venezuelan expatriates that escaped from their country. Nearly 200,000 Venezuelans settled
in Peru, others moved to Peru and then to Chile or Argentina from there. Kuczynski was one of
the leaders of the Latin American faction that asks for the democratization of
Venezuela.[27] Peru revoked Venezuela's invitation to the 8th Summit of the Americas because
of Maduro's plan to hold an early presidential election, as the major opposing parties were
banned from it.[28]
Controversies[edit]
First impeachment[edit]
Main article: First impeachment process against Pedro Pablo Kuczynski
On 15 December 2017, the Congress of the Republic initiated impeachment proceeding
against Kuczynski, with the congressional opposition stating that he had lost the ″moral
capacity″ to lead the country after he admitted receiving advisory fees from scandal-hit
Brazilian construction company Odebrecht while he was Peru's Minister of Economy and
Finance between 2004 and 2005.[29] Kuczynski had previously denied receiving any payments
from Odebrecht, but later confessed that his company, Westfield Capital Ltd, had been
receiving money from Odebrecht for advisory services, while still denying that irregularities
existed in the payments.[30]
Pardon of Alberto Fujimori[edit]
Main article: Pardon of Alberto Fujimori
On 24 December 2017, three days after surviving the impeachment vote, Kuczynski pardoned
former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.[31]
Second impeachment, Kenjivideos and resignation[edit]

Martín Vizcarra shortly after taking office

Main articles: Second impeachment process against Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Kenjivideos
scandal, and Resignation of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski
After further scandals broke out surrounding Kuczynski, a second impeachment vote was to be
held on 22 March 2018. Two days before the vote, Kuczynski stated that he would not resign
and decided to face the impeachment process for a second time. The next day on 21 March
2018, a video was released of Kuczynski allies, including his lawyer and Kenji Fujimori,
attempting to buy the vote against impeachment from one official.[32]
Following the release of the video, Kuczynski presented himself before congress and officially
submitted his resignation to the Council of Ministers.[11][12] Kuczynski's first vice president, Martín
Vizcarra, was later named President of Peru on 23 March 2018.

Family and personal life