Pedro Pablo Kuczynski

His parents fled Germany in 1933 to escape from Nazism.

His father, born in Berlin, then capital city of the German Empire, was a German Jew of distant Polish origin, and his mother was Protestant, of Swiss-French descent.

Entering Peru in 1936, Maxime Kuczyński sent his son to be educated first in Lima at Markham College, and then in Lancashire in England at Rossall School, where he was a pupil in the Maltese Cross House between 1953 and 1956.

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard (born 3 October 1938), also known simply as PPK, is a Peruvian economist, public administrator, and former politician who served as the 59th President of Peru from 2016 to 2018.

He served as Prime Minister of Peru and as Minister of Economy and Finance during the presidency of Alejandro Toledo.

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 presidency of 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.

From 1973 to 1975, he was a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co., an international investment bank headquartered in New York City.

In 1975, he returned to Washington, D.C. to become Chief Economist of the International Finance Corporation, the private finance arm of the World Bank.

Subsequently, he was appointed President of Halco Mining in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a mining consortium with operations in West Africa.

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.

In 1980, following 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 and returned to the private sector in the United States.

From 1983 to 1992, he was co-chairman of First Boston in New York City, an international investment bank.

In 1983, he helped found the Inter-American Dialogue and remained a member until 1997.

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 was a presidential candidate in the 2011 presidential election, placing third.

His opponents Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori went on to the 5 June 2011 runoff election, in which Humala was elected.

Kuczynski went on to stand in the 2016 election, where he narrowly defeated Fujimori in the second round.

He was sworn in as president on 28 July 2016.

The newly installed government accused Kuczynski of funnelling about $18 million (equivalent to $115 million in 2016) to Nelson Rockefeller’s International Petroleum Company.

He joined the World Bank as the chief economist managing the northern countries of Latin America, moving on to become Chief of Policy Planning.

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 avenue in Lima) and in San Martín square, but they attacked my apartment. Just as 3 million Peruvians, I left the country".

On 15 December 2017, the Congress of Peru, which was controlled by the opposition Popular Force, initiated impeachment proceedings against Kuczynski, after he was accused of lying about receiving payments from the scandal-hit Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht in the mid-2000s.

However, on 21 December 2017, the Peruvian Congress lacked the majority of votes needed to impeach Kuczynski.

Kuczynski resigned from the presidency on 23 March 2018, following a successful impeachment vote and days before a probable conviction vote.

After further scandals and facing a second impeachment vote, Kuczynski resigned from 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.

He was succeeded as president by his First Vice President Martín Vizcarra.

Since 10 April 2019 he has been in pretrial detention, due to an ongoing investigation on corruption, money laundering, and connections to Odebrecht, a public works company accused of paying bribes.

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was born in the Miraflores District of Lima to parents who fled from Germany after the Nazis came to power.

Kuczynski worked in the United States before entering Peruvian politics.

He held positions at both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund before being designated the general manager of Peru's Central Reserve Bank.

On 28 April 2019, Kuczynski was placed under house arrest while under investigation for allegedly taking bribes from Odebrecht.

Kuczynski was born in Miraflores, Lima, Peru, as the first son of Madeleine (née Godard) and Maxime Hans Kuczyński, one of the earliest public health leaders in Peru.

He is a cousin of the French film director and critic Jean-Luc Godard.