A Useless List of Countries and Presidents
Being bored and a bit disappointed about the most recent French presidential election, I decided to check what countries currently have in office a head of state that was an employee of a bank or another financial institution. I used Wikipedia for this endeavor that is of no use whatsoever. As the title says, this really is a useless list.
[The more interesting fact is the number of current presidents that have studied and got a degree from a US or a UK university, which is at least half of all presidents. One could almost make a boring conspiracy theory out of this. Probably someone already did.]
Please let me know in the comments bellow if I missed anyone.
So, without further ado, I present you the lucky 16:
Afghanistan - Ashraf Ghani
He joined the World Bank in 1991, working on projects in East and South Asia through the mid-1990s.
American Samoa - Lolo Matalasi Moliga
Lolo Letalu Matalasi Moliga (born 1949) is an American Samoan politician, former educator, businessman, and former President of the Development Bank of American Samoa (DBAS) from 2009 to 2012.
Andorra - Emmanuel Macron
Macron is the President of France and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra, having assumed these offices on 14 May 2017. He worked as an Inspector of Finances in the Inspectorate General of Finances (IGF), then became an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque.
Argentina - Mauricio Macri
In 1984, he worked in the credit department of Citibank Argentina in Buenos Aires.
Burkina Faso - Roch Marc Christian Kaboré
Kaboré, like his father, worked as a banker for the International Bank of Burkina (BIB). He was eventually promoted to head Burkina Faso's largest bank during the presidency of Thomas Sankara. In 1984, aged 27, he was named the General Director of the BIB; he remained in that post until September 1989, when he was appointed to the government.
Côte d'Ivoire - Alassane Ouattara
He was an economist for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. from 1968 to 1973, and afterwards he was the BCEAO's Chargé de Mission in Paris from 1973 to 1975. With the BCEAO, he was then Special Advisor to the Governor and Director of Research from February 1975 to December 1982 and Vice Governor from January 1983 to October 1984. From November 1984 to October 1988 he was Director of the African Department at the IMF, and in May 1987 he additionally became Counsellor to the Managing Director at the IMF. On 28 October 1988 he was appointed as Governor of the BCEAO, and he was sworn in on 22 December 1988.
Estonia - Kersti Kaljulaid
From 1996 to 1997 Kaljulaid was a sales manager in state-owned telecom Eesti Telefon and from 1997 to 1998 a project manager in Hoiupanga Investeeringute AS. From 1998 to 1999 she was employed in Hansabank's investment banking division Hansabank Markets.
Finland - Sauli Niinistö
After the end of his term as a cabinet minister in 2003, Niinistö became vice-chairman of the board of directors at the European Investment Bank.
France - Emmanuel Macron
Macron is the President of France and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra, having assumed these offices on 14 May 2017. He worked as an Inspector of Finances in the Inspectorate General of Finances (IGF), then became an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque.
Hong Kong - Leung Chun-ying
From 2002 to 2007, Leung was a board member in the Government of Singapore-owned banking firm DBS Group Holdings Ltd and DBS Bank Hong Kong Ltd.
Kenya - Uhuru Kenyatta
Between 1979 and 1980, he also briefly worked as a teller at the Kenya Commercial Bank.
Liberia - Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
After Samuel Doe seized power in a coup d'état and executed Tolbert, Sirleaf fled to the U.S. She worked for the World Bank before moving to Nairobi, where she worked for Citibank and then the Equator Bank.
Mali - Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta
Returning to Mali, he became a technical consultant for the European Development Fund, putting together the first small-scale development program for the European Union's aid activities in Mali.
Paraguay - Horacio Cartes
At the age of 19, he started a currency exchange business which grew into the Banco Amambay. Cartes' name appears in the Offshore leaks files in connection with a Cook Islands financial entity linked to Cartes' Paraguayan bank Banco Amambay. A classified WikiLeaks cable from 2010 mentioned Cartes as the focus of a money laundering investigation by the DEA.
Peru - Pedro Pablo Kuczynski
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).
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.
Sierra Leone - Ernest Bai Koroma
Koroma joined the Sierra Leone National Insurance Company in 1978. In 1985, he joined the Reliance Insurance Trust Corporation (Ritcorp), and in 1988, he became managing director of Ritcorp, remaining in that position for 14 years.
Singapore - Tony Tan
In 1969, Tan left the University of Singapore to begin a career in banking with Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), where he rose to become General Manager, before leaving the bank to pursue a career in politics in 1979.
In December 1991, Tan stepped down from the Cabinet to return to the private sector, and rejoined the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer from 1992 to 1995, while retaining his seat in Parliament as a representative for the Sembawang Group Representation Constituency.
Tan stepped down as Deputy Prime Minister and Co-ordinating Minister for Security and Defence on 1 September 2005. After his retirement from the Cabinet, Tan became the chairman of the National Research Foundation and deputy chairman of the Research, Innovation and Enterprise Council. He was also the Executive Director of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), and Chairman of Singapore Press Holdings Limited (SPH).